Sentimental Heart
by musiksnob
Summary: Eli and Clare try to mend their relationship, while Eli copes with his past issues.  Sequel to I Thought I Saw Your Face Today.  Eclare. Now complete.
1. Sink to the Bottom

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Degrassi or anything else.**

**Twitter: themusiksnob / Tumblr: musiksnob**

**This is a sequel to I Thought I Saw Your Face Today. If you haven't read it already, I would recommend reading it first, although there will probably be enough summary in this that you'll at least know what is going on. ITISYFT is probably the fic I am most proud of, so I'm sure you'll enjoy it if you give it a shot. This takes place the summer after Eli crashes Morty and is sent to the mental hospital. The scenes in this will build toward the events that happen in the epilogue of ITISYFT.  
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**This is going to be less plot driven than ITISYFT and more vignette-like. It will be a collection of scenes, mostly – if not all – from Eli's POV as he deals with his anxiety issues, his prescription drug dependency, his hoarding, and the past abuse he suffered – oh yeah, and how he puts his relationship back together with Clare. I expect this will be around 10 chapters total, though that may change if I get more ideas or if certain things don't work out.**

**I am sorry for the extremely long wait for this chapter. I literally started it on April 22, and then after everything that happened in DTW, it was too hard to write. Although this is fairly angsty, there will be some nice, lighter moments in some of the future chapters and hopefully it won't be quite so difficult.**

**This story is dedicated to Sarenka222 who inspired me to write it after giving me a tiny bit of grief over skipping over the healing process that Eli and Clare go through to get to the epilogue in ITISYFT. She also helped me fix this chapter and gave me the encouragement I needed to get this done.**

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><p>Chapter 1<p>

"You want one?" my roommate Brian asked me, holding out a pack of cigarettes. I was pacing in front of the bench he was sitting on near the entrance of the hospital. Clare was supposed to arrive twenty minutes ago so we could talk for a few minutes before our therapy session.

"Nah, thanks man." I had bummed a couple off him in the past few weeks when the cravings for my anxiety pills had gotten too bad, but I figured I didn't really need to add a nicotine addiction to my list of problems, and I knew smoking would really piss Clare off.

"She'll be here. Stop freaking out." Brian's parents had sent him in for drug rehab after they found pot in his room. I was pretty sure that wasn't the only drug he had been using, but he wouldn't admit to anything else in group. He had been pretty amused by my story of using Special K to self-medicate, but other than that, he was pretty laid-back, and we got along okay.

I saw Cece's car pull into the parking lot and breathed in a sigh of relief. She pulled up right in front of me and Clare burst out of the car. "Eli, I'm sooo sorry we're late. We had a flat tire and we had to wait for the tow truck to come and change it. I didn't miss it, did I?"

She threw her arms around me, and I almost had to take a step back from the force. I had seen her three times since the accident, but things were still a little awkward between us. After her first visit, where we had ended up making out for a few minutes before she went home, we had tried to keep a physical distance while we got comfortable with each other again. It was nice to hold her again, even if it were only for a second.

"It's fine, Clare. We've got ten minutes."

I glanced at Brian who was looking at us with an amused expression. "Clare, this is my roommate Brian. This is…" I paused, trying to figure out what to call her. She wasn't exactly my girlfriend right now, but friend seemed so inadequate. "Clare," I finished lamely.

Clare reached out to shake his hand and he let out a lungful of smoke. She wrinkled her nose in distaste as he switched his cigarette to from right to left, pulled her closer to him and brought her hand to his lips. "Eli never told me how beautiful you are," Brian smirked at me.

I tugged her hand from his. "Yes I have, and we need to go."

Brian waved in amusement as I dragged her into the hospital entrance. "He's um…interesting," Clare said with a laugh.

"He's been here even longer than me and hasn't had any visitors other than his parents. It's hard to resist a pretty girl under these conditions. He's been complaining he hasn't gotten laid in a while."

Clare blushed. "Well, clearly he's barking up the wrong tree there."

I smiled at her. I knew she was referring to her purity pledge, but part of me hoped that it was because she was still interested in being with me.

I signed her in and then we walked through the halls quietly. I could tell Clare was getting nervous. We reached Dr. Martin's therapy room and I saw the green light was on next to the door, so we could go in.

"Need a minute?" I asked her.

She looked frightened. "Do you have any tips? I've never done this before."

I squeezed her hand and she looked grateful. "Just be honest. Don't be afraid of hurting me. We can't…" My voice caught for a second. "We can't make this better if we don't talk things out."

She nodded, taking a deep breath. "Okay. I'm ready."

I dropped her hand and held the door open for her.

"Hi, Clare, I'm Dr. Martin." She extended her hand and Clare shook it tentatively. "Eli tells me this is your first therapy session."

"Yeah," she said softly.

She gestured for us to sit. There were a few single chairs scattered throughout the room, but Clare followed me onto a couch, though she sat a few feet away from me.

"Basically what we want to do today is to get you two talking again in a constructive manner about your relationship and some of the issues that Eli has been struggling with and how they affect you, Clare. Since you aren't my patient, and especially since this is your first time here, if there's something that comes up that you are uncomfortable talking about, you can let me know. There's no pressure to come up with the right answers. We just want to start a dialogue between the two of you. Just be honest with each other, and I think we'll be able to start making some progress."

Clare still looked nervous and nodded stiffly. Dr. Martin glanced at me, and I shrugged. I didn't know how to make Clare more comfortable.

"Well, I always like to start out each session by talking about something positive. So from my point of view, the most positive thing we have is that you're both here and I believe you're both interested in dealing with some of the problems in your relationship. Eli, would you like to tell us something positive about your relationship with Clare? Either something from the past or something from right now?"

I wished I didn't have to go first. "Um, well..." I glanced at Clare, who was looking down at her hands, biting her lip. "Well, right now I'm just happy she's here. That she hasn't given up on me. I know that doesn't mean we're back together or that we're going to get back together, but she means a lot to me, and I really appreciate it."

"Clare, is there something you'd like to add?"

She hesitated. "I don't know if I have anything positive to say about our current situation." My heart felt a little bit broken at her words, and I tightened my grip on the arm of the couch. "Before...before what happened, my favorite thing about Eli was how passionate he is – in everything he does. From his writing, to his interest in music, to his car." Clare's voice broke a little bit, and I cringed. Morty was destroyed in my accident, and I had lost my license for driving under the influence, so even if he had made it, it was another reminder of how much I screwed everything up. But then Clare continued, "And especially his relationship with me."

She gave me a shy smile. I wanted to reach over and grab her hand but I didn't want to press my luck. I wanted to know what kind of passionate memory she was thinking of. There were so many for me: our urban adventures, the night I slept over at her house, the time we painted scenery and laughed so hard that Zane had to come backstage and yell at us because he couldn't hear the actors.

God, things were so good between us. And I fucked it all up.

"Clare, since I've already spoke with Eli at length these past few weeks, I'd like to start with you, though Eli, of course you are welcome to jump in at any time. I just ask that you each wait until the other has completed speaking before interrupting."

Clare nodded, and Dr. Martin continued. "Why don't you tell me a little bit about your relationship with Eli? Particularly the beginning. How you met...How the relationship began. Any details you'd like to share."

She bit her lip nervously. "Well we met in English class," she began.

I felt obligated to point out that wasn't true. "_After_ I ran over your glasses."

Clare shot me a look and continued her earlier thought. "Our teacher assigned us to be writing partners, so we edit each other's work."

Dr. Martin covered her amused expression. "How has the partnership has worked out for you?"

"Pretty well," Clare said. "Eli has really pushed me to become a better writer and not be afraid to put emotions onto the page and I've helped him cut back since he has a tendency to be a little wordy."

"Me?" I teased. "Never." A tiny smile appeared on Clare's lips but it dropped off quickly.

"So once you became English partners did you become friends? Or did your relationship turn romantic right away?"

Clare shook her head. "We were friends, first. We started spending more time together – at first working on school work, but soon we'd go to movies with our friend Adam or get coffee after school." Clare blushed. "But even when we were friends, there was always something more between us. We were really flirty together and Eli was really sweet to me. I had a crush on him from almost the very beginning."

It was interesting for me to hear her talk about this part of our relationship since she and I had never really discussed it in so many words. "Since when exactly?" I asked her. I felt awkward for asking right away, but I was surprised to learn I really wanted to know.

She wouldn't meet my eye. "Since that time we cut class and you embarrassed me in public."

"And you pushed me up against the telephone pole and we were really close to kissing," I recalled. She nodded, her cheeks flushing an even deeper red. "That was the moment for me, too. When I knew I liked you."

Dr. Martin had always been really nice to me but she watched us with a soft expression on her face that I hadn't seen before. "What happened then that made you take the leap from friends to a couple?"

"Well, we kissed." Clare laughed. "It was for a school project; we were pretending to be Romeo and Juliet." Dr. Martin laughed but Clare grew serious. "And I thought that meant that we were going to get together, but Eli kept pushing me away. I was really upset, but then he finally told me about Julia." Clare broke off. "Has he told you about Julia?" Dr. Martin nodded. "Of course he has, right..."

Her voice fell and I looked her in confusion. I knew it had taken me too long to tell her the truth about Julia, but I did tell her. She had seemed to accept it right away and was really supportive in giving me time and letting me figure out how to approach dating again.

"I'm sensing that talking about Eli's relationship with Julia isn't an easy topic for you, and I know that it isn't for Eli. Is there anything you'd like to share on that?"

I shook my head, hoping to change the direction of the conversation. This seriously could not get any worse. Weren't we here to focus on me and Clare? Whenever the topic of Julia came up in therapy, I got really upset, and I didn't want Clare to think that meant I was still hung up on Julia. I wasn't. I loved her, and I knew that part of me would always blame myself for her death. But I was in love with Clare and she was the girl sitting too far from me on the couch looking really uncomfortable.

"Actually, I don't think that's fair," Clare said. "I'm not saying I haven't had my moments where I've been jealous of Eli's relationship with Julia and how serious it was but overall, I think I've been very supportive, and it bothers me that he feels he needs to hide her away from me. _I_ don't have a problem with talking about her; it's Eli that has the problem." She turned toward me and her voice softened. "I get that she was important to you, and I know that doesn't just go away. You don't have to tiptoe around me. I can hear her name and not think that your feelings for me aren't serious. When we work on your room and you get anxious when you find something that reminds you of her, you don't have to bottle it up. You can tell me."

"Okay," I said softly. I gave Dr. Martin a pleading look to change the subject, and to my surprise she did.

"Eli has told me the story of what happened on Vegas Night; I don't think we need go belabor that here. But he indicated that your relationship became romantic at that time and that everything was great for a while. Would you agree with that assessment, Clare?"

She nodded. "We had a few small roadblocks, but we were really happy together."

"When did that start to change?"

"Everything was great until Fitz came back, and then everything just got worse. Eli got really possessive. He was so obsessed with the idea that Fitz was going to hurt me that he barely let me out of his sight. Instead of spending time with me because he wanted to, he started following me around school, driving me home every afternoon. He joined the drama club even though he wasn't even interested in it, and got our friend Adam to act as a bodyguard to keep me away from Fitz whenever he wasn't around. Even on weekends, he always had an excuse to get together so that he knew where I was at all times." Clare sighed, "It didn't feel like he was my boyfriend anymore; it felt like he was my protector. And I didn't want that."

I couldn't help but be defensive. "You're acting like it was totally unwarranted. Fitz pulled a knife on me, Clare. You were there. I thought I was going to bleed out in a school corridor while Fitz turned his violence on you," I said bitterly.

"I can understand why you were upset, but Eli, come on. Fitz didn't even talk to me for over a month after he got back to school. He wasn't getting into fights with anyone. All he wanted was to graduate and get out of Degrassi. I can understand the need to be cautious but you took it too far."

"He took it too far when he tried to stab me," I roared. Dr. Martin shot me a look of caution and I sat back against the couch cushion trying to slow my breathing. I really didn't want to have a panic attack in front of Clare.

Clare seemed to need a minute to get herself back together. "By the end, I felt like our perfect relationship had totally fallen apart. I already felt like you didn't trust me, that you thought I was an object that needed to be protected rather than a person who could make her own, smart decisions. And then after the accident, when I found out about the anxiety pills, and the drugs, what happened with Mike…everything that you kept from me, I just felt like…" She let out a sob. "I was your girlfriend, Eli. I loved you. And I don't understand why you didn't come to me. I would have been there for you. Why didn't you trust me?"

"I trust you, Clare. But there are things you just can't tell people."

"I disagree."

"Right, well, next time I'll be sure to follow up 'You have pretty eyes' with 'By the way, I've been molested.'"

The feeling of panic was creeping back into my throat, and I was glad that Dr. Martin intervened. "Clare, I can understand why you'd feel that way, but I don't think you should take Eli's silence on that topic as a sign that he doesn't trust you. It's something that's not easy for anyone to talk about, and most abuse victims try to block out those memories."

"That makes sense, but what about everything else? He was abusing his anxiety pills, but I didn't even know he was taking them. He told me everything was fine, but he was clearly suffering. He went to a drug dealer and bought Special K rather than telling me he didn't want to go to a dance because it was on the day Julia died. He got high and and crashed his car and almost killed himself, and he practically broke Fitz's jaw, and I don't know how I'm supposed to deal with this." Clare took a deep breath. "How am I supposed to trust him after this?"

I knew I'd screwed up our relationship. Nothing Clare was saying surprised me. But her bringing up me hitting Fitz just reminded me of where everything had really gone downhill.

"You know, maybe I screwed up. Maybe I should have talked to you about my problems. But the truth of the matter is that when it comes down to it, I was right. Because the second I let you out of my sight, Fitz kissed you. So if you want to talk about trust, maybe you should remember that you haven't exactly been honest with me either."

Clare had largely kept it together, but I could see her chest heaving as the tears poured down her face. "I wanted to tell you, but I couldn't," Clare sobbed. "I was afraid you'd go after him or that you'd break up with me."

"Plus it must have been hard to talk with my cock in your mouth," I snapped.

Clare's eyes widened and her jaw dropped. "I can't believe you just said that."

I couldn't believe it either. Her cheeks were flaming and I knew she was just as upset at me revealing something that personal to Dr. Martin as the cruelness of my tone.

I turned to Dr. Martin, trying to find words to explain the situation that weren't quite so cutting. "Clare wears a purity ring. She took a vow of abstinence. And we'd been taking things really slowly and I felt like we were happy and on the same page about at least our physical relationship. And she showed up on my doorstep and dragged me up to my bedroom, and she took things a step farther. And I thought we were sharing this beautiful, intimate moment that we were both ready for, and it turned out that she was just feeling guilty about kissing my mortal enemy."

"It wasn't just about that," Clare protested.

"No? Then why did you ask me to sleep with you? Why did you beg me, even though I was trying to do the right thing and turn you down? Why were we just a few inches away from sharing something that should have been just about the two of us, while you were thinking about him?"

"I'm so sorry." Her voice broke as she tried to continue. "I knew it was wrong and that's why I stopped it."

"You shouldn't have started it." My jaw clenched.

"I know," she said softly.

The room went silent. I didn't think there was anything more to say.

Dr. Martin peered over her glasses at us. "Well, I think we've gotten to the bottom of your issue today. If you want to continue to be in a relationship and make it work, you're going to have to figure out how to trust each other." She hesitated for a moment, "If I can be frank for a moment...?"

I glanced at Clare and she looked just as confused as I was. Dr. Martin didn't usually hesitate to share her thoughts when I was just me. "What is it?" I asked.

"I've counseled hundreds of teenagers. I've seen girls who cling to abusive boys who treat them horribly and boys with low self-esteem who use girls because they are desperate for attention. But you two...I'd suspected it from the way that Eli spoke about you, Clare and now seeing the two of you together, I can see that my thoughts were correct."

I was about to get really nervous when she broke out into a smile. "You are really good kids and you have a really strong relationship, one of the best I've ever seen, particularly at your age. And I don't say that to make light of your issues; Eli had told me your parents' divorce has been tough on you, Clare, and obviously Eli is struggling with some very difficult issues of his own right now. But the two of you are both bright, ambitious students who have the support of your families and friends, and though you clearly have some problems with communication and trust in your relationship, I think that what you have is really special. I sometimes feel like I spend these counseling sessions trying to help my patients end their dysfunctional relationships, but this one...I really hope that you are able to mend some of these wounds."

Her words eased some of the tension in the room, but I still didn't know what to say. I wanted to repair my relationship with Clare, but I just had no idea how to begin.

Dr. Martin stood and shook each of our hands. "I'll give you a moment. There's about ten minutes before my next appointment, so please, take your time. Thank you for coming in, Clare."

She stepped into her office and closed the door behind her. I stared at my hands, unable to look at Clare. I attempted to do my flexing exercises to release the tension but it seemed to be working slower than usual.

The silence was killing me, so I thought I'd say the thought that had been flickering through my mind throughout the whole session. "I didn't realize this was going to be so hard."

It took Clare a minute to respond. "Yeah. But I think what we have is worth it."

She slipped her hand into mine and for the first time in weeks, I felt like we had made some progress.


	2. Best Imitation of Myself

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Degrassi or anything else.**

**Twitter: themusiksnob / Tumblr: musiksnob**

**Thank you so much for all of your support, especially for those of you who went back to read I Thought I Saw Your Face Today either again or for the first time. **

**Thanks again to Sarenka222 for helping me figure out Eli's anxiety level.**

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><p>Chapter 2<p>

I peered out the side window of Cece's Corolla as she drove me home from the mental hospital. It was the first time I'd been in a car since we made the trip there post accident, but I was so doped up on painkillers at the time that I'd barely been coherent. My arm had healed pretty well; the cast had come off, though my skin still looked pasty and gross.

Initially, I was enjoying the trip. They didn't run the mental hospital like a prison; we were allowed to sit outside as long as one of the attendants was out there, but the car ride provided a variety that I had missed in the almost two months it had taken them to release me.

But the longer the trip took, the more lost I felt. Her car was fine for a short trip but it wasn't Morty. And I was pretty sure Cece hadn't driven me anywhere since I got my license. But Morty was gone and I'd lost my license for at least a year, pending a psychologist's approval.

We drove past Degrassi on the way and there were tons of kids milling around. They seemed more excited than usual. "Today was the last day of school, wasn't it?" Cece asked.

"I guess so," I muttered. My eyes searched for Clare but I couldn't pick her out in the crowd.

Cece pulled up in front of our house a few minutes later, and to my surprise, Clare was waiting on my front steps. I was extra glad to see her because the idea of coming home after being in the hospital for so long was really overwhelming to me. The fact that she was waiting for me was the only force that moved me to leave the car.

She was smiling. "Cute uniform, Edwards," I teased, as I slammed the car door. "But I think my homecoming deserved formal wear." I had finally gotten used to Clare in normal clothes since the last few times I had seen her had been her weekend visits.

She blushed. "I was afraid to go home and change; I didn't want to miss you."

I walked closer to her, and all of a sudden it felt really awkward. I wanted to pull her into my arms but I knew we weren't there yet. She seemed to notice my hesitation and grinned to distract me. "Besides, this is the last time you'll see me in this uniform," she said, giving a twirl that looked out of place in her starched khaki skirt.

"Oh yeah, red shirts for you next year." And I would be stuck wearing them again too.

She shook her head, "No, the board voted and they decided to do away with the uniforms. We can wear whatever we want."

"Really?" That was great news. "I have a whole closetful of black clothing to show off."

"Some things never change," she said with a smile. She said that like it was a good thing but I knew things had to change between us if we were going to make this work.

I was about to invite her inside, when I heard Adam calling my name. He ran over to me and threw his arms around me in an uncharacteristic hug. "Welcome back, bro." I hadn't gotten to see Adam during the time I was away; Cece had offered to bring him up but his mother hadn't let him. I was a little surprised to see him here now, but really grateful. We'd talked a little on the phone or through email, but I really missed the guy.

Adam released me and looked at Clare. "Still in your uniform?" He had on a typical Adam outfit, jeans and a long-sleeved plaid t-shirt, despite the June heat.

"I didn't want to be late," she explained. "Unlike some people…"

"Eli's just glad I'm here," he said, wrapping his arms around both of our shoulders. "Right?"

"Sure."

Adam led us inside. The feeling of being totally overwhelmed came back. Adam and Clare being here made the moment feel a little more normal, but as I sat in the living room, listening to their stories about finals and the last day of school, my mind kept drifting to the last time I was home. Freaking out with nerves before the dance, wishing I had more pills. Coming back and sitting outside in Morty, tweaked out on Special K, hallucinating of Julia. I could feel my hand shaking and moved it underneath my leg, not wanting them to see how messed up I was.

Clare must have noticed my discomfort. "Eli, are you okay?"

I definitely wasn't okay but I couldn't let her see it. "I'm just going to bring my stuff up to my room." I grabbed the duffel bag I had dumped in the entryway and sprinted up the stairs, desperate to get away from their concerned faces.

The door to my room was cracked open. Even though I'd stopped using the lock, the door was always closed, and I opened it with trepidation.

It was worse than I expected. _All_ of my stuff had been moved. Stacks of records had toppled over. Clothes, and papers, and knickknacks mixed together on the floor, but not in the way I had left them. A box that had been perched on top of my laundry hamper was across the room next to my dresser.

I choked down a gasp. My parents had warned me that they had searched my room for more drugs, even though I had been truthful when I told them the few pills I had left over in Morty were the only ones. They swore they hadn't thrown anything out, but that wasn't the sum of my fears.

They didn't understand. They saw my room as a mess, as a random pile of junk. But it wasn't random. Each item I collected had a place, a very specific place so that I could find them at a moment's notice. There was an order to my madness, and having that disrupted…

I grabbed onto the doorknob to prevent my legs from coming out from under me. I did my breathing exercises, trying to calm myself down. I trudged over to my bed, the careful path that Clare had helped me clear disturbed by my parents' tornado. I lay down, breathing loudly and strongly and repeating in my head, "You're okay. You're okay. You're okay."

I tried to remember all of the progress I had made. I had thrown out a lot of stuff – stuff that I never would have been able to get rid of a year ago. I had moved things to places that made more sense, into boxes and off of the floor, and I was still okay. I knew I could fix this. It was good to get rid of stuff and it was okay if things weren't exactly where I had left them.

If only I could make myself believe that.

A few minutes later, I could feel my heartbeat slowing down and my breathing returning to normal. I was starting to feel proud of myself for handling my first mini-anxiety attack at home so well and without medication, when I noticed a large cardboard box sticking out behind my door.

I was trying to convince myself to go downstairs and watch TV with Adam and Clare and leave this mystery box for later but my curiosity got the best of me. I didn't like the idea of something being in my room without me knowing it.

I carried the heavy box over to my bed and opened the flap. A folded blanket hid the rest of the objects – a familiar looking red, brown and orange striped blanket that I had brought with me when Clare and I went on another picnic at the abandoned church.

A blanket I had left in the back of Morty.

I flung the blanket over my shoulder and dug through the rest of the box. Stacks of CDs, most missing cases. My insurance card and registration from the glove compartment. A couple of paperback books I kept in the back in case I was stuck somewhere and needed to kill time.

I flipped through the contents quickly, trying to remember everything, trying to figure out what was missing. I paused when I found the picture of me and Julia – the picture that had been my downfall. It took all the willpower I had to place the photo gently on my bed, rather than to rip it to shreds.

I was pissed…so fucking pissed that my parents must have gone to the impound lot and cleaned out Morty without even telling me. They might have missed something; they didn't know what was important.

A few candy wrappers and an empty coke can. A sweater of Clare's that was now stained with grease from a rag that had been lying on top of it in the box. A jar of change for tolls.

My hands were shaking as I turned over the last few items. I couldn't believe that these were the remnants of my life with Morty, that this was all I had left. I ran through the catalog in my head, trying to figure out what was missing. They had done a good job, saving things no one else on earth would have saved, but I knew there was something I had lost. It was bad enough that I would never get to see Morty again, that I had fucked him up beyond repair. The panic settled in my throat as I frantically wracked my brain for the answer.

Clare's poem.

Oh, God, Clare's poem wasn't in here. I flipped through the pages of notebooks, trying to find the ratty napkin that she had presented me with during lunch. It wasn't wrapped in her sweater or stuck inside the Coke can or…

Fuck I couldn't breathe. I gasped for air, clutching my chest as I sank to my knees, resting my forehead on the bed. I wasn't sure if I was going to puke, have a heart attack, or die but I hadn't felt like this in a long time. Not since before Dr. Loughner. Not since before the anti-anxiety meds.

"Cece," I croaked, unable to get enough oxygen to formulate words. I wanted to call her, to ask her to bring me the bottle of pills I knew she had hidden somewhere, to beg to give me more than one to make this pain go away more quickly.

The breathing techniques and the mantra weren't working. I collapsed into a ball on the ground, hoping that this would be quick.

"Eli!" I heard Adam's sharp intake of breath and was glad that I didn't see Clare behind him.

"Close the door," I managed to get out.

He did as I asked then ran to my side and helped me pull myself into a seated position on the floor at the foot of my bed. "Do you want me to get Cece? Do you need an anxiety pill?"

"No," I cried as vehemently as I could. "Not with Clare here."

"Eli," Adam chided.

"I don't want her to know how weak I am."

"You're not weak you're sick."

My body had stopped convulsing but my hands were still shaking. "I'm addicted. I need to break the addiction."

"Dude, I get where you're coming from. But the problem is you're not addicted to heroin. You actually need these."

I shook my head. "I can beat it. It's the only way I can get better."

Adam gave me a hard look. "What's going on, Eli? You've been up here forever."

I wanted to tell him about the room and my stuff and the box and the cravings and the panic attack but my voice box locked itself up. "I lost Clare's poem." My voice was a scratchy whisper.

"Which poem?"

Did it matter? "She wrote it…during lunch…on a napkin," I struggled, taking deep breaths between each phrase.

"The dirty one?" he asked. I narrowed my eyes, not understanding. "The one Ms. Dawes forced her to read out loud until she realized just how sexual the words were?"

Now that Adam brought it up, I remembered that moment – watching Clare's blushing face as she read the poem out loud, fully knowing that it was about me and how much she loved and wanted me. I wanted to hear her read that poem to me again.

"I lost it," I repeated, sniffling to try to keep the tears inside.

"Well, she handed it in for English class, so she must have a copy on her computer. She didn't give Ms. Dawes the napkin."

"It's not the same," I whispered, and Adam peered at me curiously.

"It's about the words, Eli. It's about the feeling." He gestured around the room. "It's not about the piece of paper it's written on."

Adam and I joked around most of the time. I think this was the first serious conversation we'd had since I told him about Julia. But I found his wise words were stuck in my head, and they did make me feel a little bit better.

"I can't ask her for it," I said, my voice still soft but less shaky. "It's a love poem. It's about how she used to feel about us."

"She loves you, Eli. She wouldn't be sitting downstairs waiting for you if she didn't."

Adam stood and then held out his hand for me and helped me up. "Come on," he said. "I'll turn on the Xbox. You don't need to talk until you're ready."

"Wait," I said, recalling something Adam had just said to me. "How did you know Cece was hiding anxiety pills in case I needed them?"

His face fell. Adam was a terrible liar and I watched him try to think up an excuse before he sighed and told me the truth, "Cece and Bullfrog told me. I came over a few days ago and we talked about what things would be like for you when you got home and how we could help you."

I squeezed my eyes shut, unable to look at him. I couldn't believe they had done that. "Was Clare there?" I gasped.

Adam nodded. "Like I said…she wouldn't be here if she didn't love you. We both just want you to be happy."

I wanted to be angry, but I knew Adam had kind of put himself out on the friendship line, so I just clapped his shoulder and gave him a smirk. I was too emotional to talk about feelings anymore so I just headed downstairs, feeling a little lighter than I had a few minutes ago.

When we reached the living room, Adam immediately turned on the TV and started setting up. I saw Clare was sitting on the edge of the couch, biting her fingernail. She looked at me nervously. "Everything okay?"

"Never better," I said glibly. She flinched and I realized the last time I had used those words was when I was pretending I didn't care about her. I leaned into her a little and placed my hand on her back for just a few seconds. "Because you're here."

Her eyes lit up and I was glad I saved that moment. Adam handed me the controller. "Get ready to lose."

* * *

><p>Adam grabbed another piece of Italian bread. "And then Drew took off his uniform shirt and ran out of the classroom. Of course, who's the first person he runs into? Our mom, the only person on the school board who voted to keep the uniforms." Adam shook his head. "He's going to be grounded for at least two weeks."<p>

"For taking his shirt off in school? It wasn't like he was naked," Bullfrog said. "Man, if they grounded you for taking your shirt off in high school, Cece…"

"Ugh, Dad, don't finish that sentence," I said. I was shoveling Cece's incredible baked ziti into my mouth at a record pace. It beat institution food by a mile. "Mom, this is the best food I've ever had."

She grinned. "Glad you liked it."

Adam guzzled down the last of his Coke. "Oh, we forgot to grab the wine; does anyone want some?"

The light mood immediately came to a halt as Clare looked at me with wide eyes and Cece shook her head. "I think we'll stick to soda tonight, Adam. I have to get up early tomorrow and Bullfrog's stomach has been acting up and you kids really aren't supposed to be drinking anyway."

"I'm not an alcoholic," I reminded her. "You can drink wine around me. I won't even have a glass if it makes you feel better, but even if I did, I'd be fine."

Bullfrog looked uncomfortable. "We're just trying to follow the rules. When things are more settled down, we can revisit this."

I rolled my eyes. They'd been letting me drink a glass of wine or two with dinner every now and then for about three years.

"That was delicious, Cece," Clare said, placing her fork back on her plate. She glanced at her watch. "Oh, my dad's going to be here in a few minutes. He wanted to take me out for ice cream to celebrate finishing Grade 10 and I couldn't talk him out of it." She gave me a sad look, and I really didn't want her to leave either. We hadn't talked much, though our spirits were higher during the video game marathon and our amusing family dinner.

"Can I walk you out?" I asked her, and she nodded. I noticed Cece giving me that approving Mom look that I hadn't seen very much of lately.

She thanked my parents and gave Adam a quick hug, and then I followed her out the front door. I was glad her dad hadn't arrived yet, because I wanted to talk with her alone.

"Thanks for coming over today," I said, not wanting to overwhelm her. "It was really great to see you."

"You too," she said.

"Clare, I…" I broke off, trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to say. I could see something in her eyes, something that looked a lot like hope, and that gave me some confidence. "I want to do things the right way between us. I want us to be able to trust each other again, for you to trust me. I want to take things slow and get to know you again, as friends and hopefully at some point, as more than friends. I wanted to know if I could take you out on Friday night, a date – just the two of us."

She smiled and her cheeks were a little flushed as she nodded. "I would like that very much."

"Great," I said, letting out a sigh of relief.

"What do you want to do?"

Crap. I hadn't thought ahead that far. "I'll surprise you," I said. Her eyes widened and I realized she might have had enough surprises with me lately. "I'll text you Thursday with a really big hint."

"Okay," she said, her smile reaching her eyes once more.

Her Dad pulled up in front of the house. I wasn't sure exactly what her parents thought of me, and I wasn't sure I wanted to find out.

"You better go," I said, not wanting to pull my gaze from her.

"Goodnight, Eli," she whispered. She gave me a short kiss on the cheek and ran down the steps toward her Dad's car.

I managed to wait until they had pulled away before I touched the imprint of her kiss on my face.

Her lips were soft and loving. And they looked best when in a smile.

I decided I would do anything to make sure they stayed that way.


	3. Another First Kiss

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Degrassi or anything else.**

**Twitter: themusiksnob / Tumblr: musiksnob**

**The chapter title "Another First Kiss" is a reference to the They Might Be Giants Song "First Kiss." The lyrics feel a little more fitting than the actual song title (although about half the places on the internet have the title wrong anyway, so who knows.)**

**Thank you for reading and especially for reviewing. I feel like people's interest in Degrassi fanfic has died down a bit during the hiatus and writing a sequel doesn't exactly help attract readers, so I'd really, really like to thank you for your support.**

**(Edited slightly to fix a glaring continuity error about Darcy and when Eli found out about her situation. Thanks Sarenka222 for knowing the details of my stories better than I do!)  
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* * *

><p>Chapter 3<p>

Bullfrog drove me over to Clare's that Friday night, and I spent the ride over paralyzed with nerves. I kept trying to remind myself that this was Clare and we'd spent four months as a couple and three months as friends before my accident. It was just a date – something we'd done countless times before – and there was no need to be so scared.

There was a lot at stake here. I had to show Clare that I was getting better, that I could make a relationship work without all the pressure I had put on her last time. This felt like a first date, and coming up with something that could rival our real first date with the Chuck Palahniuk reading, and the matching piercings and the contraband kissing, was pretty much impossible. I had texted her yesterday asking if it was okay for us to hang out at her house and telling her she shouldn't eat in advance. I didn't want to totally ruin the surprise, but I wanted her to feel comfortable.

Of course, being comfortable wasn't something that was too easy for me right now. I hadn't really left the house since I got home on Tuesday except for grocery shopping with Cece. She had taken the week off work, not wanting to leave me home alone, and as much as it was weird to have her hovering around, I was grateful I wasn't alone. And though I'd managed to stay calm enough to not have to take any pills, it was less stressful to know that if I needed one, Cece or Bullfrog could get one for me.

The doctors had recommended taking a low dose anti-anxiety pill daily, but when they put me in it for the first week at the hospital, I felt like a zombie. I fought them on it until they agreed I could go back to the "take as needed" method as long as my parents controlled the medicine since the dose was much stronger and just as habit-forming as the ones that had gotten me into trouble. I was afraid I wasn't going to break the cycle of addiction if I was habitually taking the pills, but the result of my decision was that leaving my house could lead to a situation that I wasn't really prepared to handle.

I really hoped I could keep myself together in front of Clare.

"You've got everything?" Bullfrog asked as he pulled up to her house.

"Yeah, thanks for the ride."

"What time do you want me to get you? I'd tell you to call me later, but your mom and I might be a little busy."

I rolled my eyes. "Can you get me at 9:30? I don't want to cut into your alone time."

Bullfrog gave me a curious look. "That's pretty early. I know Clare doesn't put out but that barely leaves enough time for some under the shirt action."

Ugh. "I'm trying to get her back, not get into her pants. And it if doesn't go well, I want to be able to get out early. Plus I don't want to piss her dad off. So get me at 9:30."

"Call me if you change your mind. If I don't answer, just leave a message."

I grabbed the green grocery bags and proceeded up her front walk. I hesitated for a moment in front of her door. _Don't freak out. Don't freak out. Don't freak out._

I was about to knock when the door flew open. "You're here!" Clare said happily. "I heard the car."

Clare looked beautiful. She had on a pink casual dress and had a purple headband pushing back her springy curls. Though she always looked lovely, I was trying to figure out what was different about her. Her eyes were lit and her cheeks were flushed.

And she was giving me the first completely genuine smile since before Fitz came back.

"Hey," I said softly, trying to resist the urge to lean in and kiss her pink, perfect lips.

"What's all this?" she asked, gesturing to the bags as I followed her into the kitchen.

"Dinner," I said. "I thought we could make some quesadillas. Hungry?"

She nodded and her eyes lit up as she watched me pull the ingredients out of the bag: tortillas, cheese, sour cream and salsa, refried beans, tomatoes. "That's such a great idea. We've never cooked together before."

"Are you a good cook?" I asked.

"I can make toast. And brownies," she giggled.

"I can't even do that," I joked. I pulled out a glass storage container. "Cece cooked the chicken for me so that we don't end up with salmonella."

"Good thinking." Clare walked around the island and stood next to me. "What can I do to help?"

"We need a frying pan and some butter," I said and she started rattling through the cabinet to find one. She started heating the pan and melting the butter while I found a knife and cutting board and starting chopping a tomato.

I popped the chicken into the microwave to start heating it up and Clare opened the can of beans. She pulled two plates out of the cabinet and laid out two tortillas. We covered them with chicken and cheese and all the fixings.

"Now what?"

"After you," I said.

She pushed her quesadilla off her plate and it started to sizzle. I turned down the heat a little and we watched it cook.

"How do we know when it's done?" Clare asked.

I shrugged. "When the cheese is melted, I guess." I suddenly wished I had paid more attention when Cece cooked.

"I think we need to flip it," she said. "So the top tortilla can get toasted."

I moved to grab the handle, not realizing that Clare's pan didn't have a coated handle like Cece's did. "Ouch!"

"Oh my God, are you okay?" she asked frantically, grabbing my wrist.

"Yeah, it wasn't that hot yet." I reluctantly pulled my arm from hers and grabbed an oven mitt. "How am I supposed to flip this?" I made a flipping motion like I had seen Cece do with pancakes, but the quesadilla didn't even move.

"Maybe we're supposed to use a spatula?" Clare sounded just as unsure as I was. She pulled one from the drawer and stuck it underneath but it wasn't big enough to lift the whole thing. She finally flicked it over and was able to unfold the quesadilla so it lay flat without losing all of the stuff inside.

"I don't think culinary school is in our future," I teased and she smiled.

We let it cook for a few minutes in more companionable silence. She lifted the top and decided the cheese was melted enough. With some difficulty we managed to get it out of the pan and onto a plate. It was a little mangled looking but it smelled really good.

"I should have done mine first. It wasn't nice to make you the guinea pig," I said, and Clare laughed.

"I'm sure it tastes just fine."

She watched as I dumped my quesadilla into the pan. "You should eat. It's going to get cold."

Clare shook her head. "I'll wait for you." She filled two glasses with Coke and brought them over to the kitchen table while I watched my quesadilla cook.

I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. "Hello, Eli," Mr. Edwards said politely. He had always been nice to me, even though I was sure he wasn't super happy I was dating his daughter – and that was before the accident. "That smells great," he said. He reached into the fridge and grabbed some ham and cheese, and I realized he was about to make a sandwich for dinner.

"Why don't you join us?" I suggested. "There's more than enough and quesadillas are much better than sandwiches for dinner."

"I don't want to interrupt your date," he said in a tone that wasn't unfriendly but told me that he knew a lot more about the state of my relationship with Clare than I had hoped.

"You won't be interrupting," I said. "We're the ones who are taking over your kitchen."

"Yeah, Dad, it's fine," Clare said. Her father narrowed his eyes at her and I could tell her was trying to read what she was thinking. I wasn't sure myself. Part of her seemed happy that I was willing to include her father.

Maybe it was wishful thinking, but it also seemed like she was disappointed that our date had been interrupted.

"How about this? I'll make a quesadilla but I'll eat it upstairs. I've got some work to finish up on the Crawford merger anyway." He put one together as I flipped mine over, slightly better than the first time, and finished heating it up.

I joined Clare at the table, noticing that her hands were folded, her head was bowed and her lips were moving silently. She opened her eyes after a minute and smiled at me. "You can pray out loud," I said softly. "It's not something you need to hide from me."

"Maybe I didn't want you to hear what I was praying about," she said. Her eyes were dancing and I felt really good about where we were for the first time.

We ate silently for a few minutes. It was a little awkward with her father standing a few feet away at the stove. I watched him flip his quesadilla with a lot more skill than either Clare or I had. "Nice job, Mr. Edwards," I called.

He turned and smiled at me. "I've picked up a few tricks over the years."

Clare wiped her mouth with her napkin. "I'll be back in a minute."

"Where are you going?" I asked, nervous about her answer.

She blushed. "I have to pee," she whispered and I laughed as she ran up the stairs. It was cute how embarrassed she got about the littlest things even though we had been so intimate in the past. I took another bite of my quesadilla, trying to push the image of Clare lying naked on top of me out of my mind.

"So how are you doing, Eli?" Mr. Edwards asked.

"I'm doing good, sir," I said. "Just taking things day by day."

He nodded, and I realized this might be my only opportunity to convince him that in spite of my problems, I was still good for his daughter. "I just wanted to thank you for letting me come over here. I know you must be worried about Clare but I promise you that I love your daughter and I only want what is best for her."

Mr. Edwards put up his hand. "You don't need to convince me, Eli. Clare and I have talked about it, and I'm comfortable with the two of you trying to work things out as long as you take things slowly and you don't ever hurt my baby girl again."

Wow. "Thank you. I mean, I won't," I laughed nervously. "Sorry, I wasn't expecting that."

He scooped his meal out of the frying pan and onto his plate and gave me a serious look. "I don't know what Clare has told you about my daughter, Darcy. But she went through a rough time a few years ago and she made some mistakes. And I wouldn't want people to write her off because of it. So I'm willing to give you second chance, but she's my little girl, Eli. If you screw up again, you won't get another."

"I won't need one," I promised. Clare had told me about her sister fairly recently while I was still at the hospital, right after I had come clean about the abuse him my past. I had known it was difficult for Clare to deal with her sister's abandonment; she had been in Kenya for almost two years without returning home for a visit and her phone calls and emails were infrequent, but that was the first I had heard about the reasons why she left. I was glad that her father could make the connection between a tragic event, leading to bad behavior, rather than giving up on me.

Clare bounded down the stairs and Mr. Edwards and I exchanged a glance. He grabbed a beer from the fridge as I smeared guacamole on a bite of my quesadilla. "Did I miss something?" she asked, and I shook my head. She looked concerned but went back to her meal without a word.

Mr. Edwards brought his quesadilla over to the table to dab some salsa and sour cream on his plate. "Have fun, you two," he said, giving me a strict enough look that I knew there was a silent "but not too much" prohibition behind his words.

Being with Clare, alone, in her house and not in a glass room at the mental hospital, felt so comfortable. I watched every change in her expression – from her smiles to her grins. The happiness never dropped of her face as we talked about the things we wanted to do this summer.

I promised her a date to Wonderland and she wanted to organize a trip to the beach with Alli and Sav. She decided to skip out on the Blue Jays games that Adam was going to drag me to so he'd have someone to talk to while Drew and his parents cheered, but decided that the three of us should have a few movie marathons where each of us got to pick one movie, despite the fact that Adam always picked something she hated.

It was encouraging to me that she was so excited about spending time with me. I tried to keep my excitement under control, not wanting to scare her away. But it wasn't all good news. She was going to be a counselor at her church's vacation bible school which would take up a lot of her time and her mom had brought up taking a trip out to Vancouver to check out UBC. I tried to sound supportive even as the idea of spending time apart from Clare scared me almost as much as the thought of her going to university halfway across the country.

After dinner we cleaned up together. I filled the sink with water while she wiped down the stove. I scrubbed the pan and rinsed off the plates as she filled the dishwasher and put the leftovers into the fridge. She found a few cookies for us to split as a dessert, since for some reason, that hadn't occurred to me.

By the time we had finished, it was already nine o'clock. I knew I could call Bullfrog and ask him to get me later, but things were going so well, and I figured it was better to leave things on a high note. "We've got about half an hour," I said, and I could see Clare looked a little disappointed.

"We could watch tv," she suggested. She hung back as I led the way to the couch and sat down in the corner. She hesitated for just a second before sitting down on the cushion next to mine. For some reason, it reminded me of our counseling session, but this we weren't sitting as far away from each other as possible.

She flipped through a few channels halfheartedly before turning the power off and turning to me. "Eli, how have things been since you've been home?" she asked, her tone serious for the first time during our date.

I wished we could go back to the lighthearted moments, but I knew Clare wouldn't let up until I gave her a satisfactory answer. "Good," I said. "Better than I thought."

"What did you think it would be like?" She inched closer to me.

I shrugged. "At the hospital, even though a lot of it kind of sucks, you get really comfortable. It feels like a safe place. And then when you go back home, it's not safe anymore. It's where you made all of your mistakes. It's where you feel pressure to make them again."

"But it's not like that?"

"Not exactly." I pursed my lips, trying to figure out how to explain the feeling. "It's like…I want things so bad. I want to stop having panic attacks and taking meds and hoarding. But I can't just will myself to do the right thing. It's not being at home that's making me feel unsafe." I let out a deep breath, afraid I was going to push her away. "It's me."

"Well, that's why you have me and Adam and your parents. We're supposed to help you feel safe so that it's easier for you to make the right choices."

I closed my eyes. "And that's important. But you can't fix me by wanting it bad enough either."

I felt Clare move even closer to me on the couch. We were centimeters away from touching. "I know. But if you need me…for anything…all you need to do is ask."

God, right now, I needed her. I needed her mouth on mine, her hands on my chest. I needed to feel her skin pressing against me and her legs wrapped around me. I shifted a little in my seat as my pants grew uncomfortable. "Thanks," I said softly, not trusting me voice to say much more than that.

"So can I surprise you for date night next Friday?" she asked, and I looked up at her in surprise.

"This went well enough that you already want to plan a second date?" I teased.

"This has been perfect," she said. She nestled into my side and I put my arm around her shoulders.

"I'm really glad."

She smiled. "I'm going to my grandma's tomorrow and I won't get back until Monday, but I was wondering if I could come over on Tuesday? I was thinking we could do some work in your room…unless you think it's too soon."

My doctors had encouraged me to continue making progress on my hoarding issues. They seemed to think I had been doing a good job, though things had slowed down considerably once I became preoccupied with Fitz and Clare. "They want me to keep working on it," I said. "Though they said I need to take it slowly. Baby steps, they said. Take it little by little."

"We'll aim for ten things," she said and immediately blushed. I remembered our game, where whenever I threw out ten things we'd take a ten minute kissing break. Her goal was to have three of our kissing breaks each session, but we'd usually get so wrapped up in each other that cleaning fell by the wayside pretty rapidly.

"I'll accept rewards in the form of chocolate," I said, wanting to make her feel comfortable. "Or comic books."

"Chocolate it is," she laughed. "Comic books would be just another thing you'd need to find a place for."

I squeezed her shoulder and she looked like she was about to say something when we heard a car horn outside. "That's Bullfrog," I said, really feeling disappointed. I pulled my arm away from her and was about to stand up, when she tugged on my hand.

"Wait."

I turned toward her and looked into her eyes. "This is our first date since everything happened and it was really great, and…" Her cheeks were turning that lovely rosy pink, and I longed to reach out and touch them. "I was thinking that we should end this lovely night with a kiss."

My eyes crinkled with happiness. "You're sure?"

She nodded. "I want to."

One of my hands found its way to her face and my thumb brushed the apple of her cheek. I leaned into her and she met me halfway, our lips meeting in the softest, gentlest kiss we'd ever exchanged. The light touch sent my heart racing, and I was about to pull back when her fingers tangled in my hair and pulled me closer, deepening the kiss.

I put everything I had into this, the passion I felt for her, and the longing over weeks without her. Her tongue stroked my deliberately, opening my mouth a little wider than a simple goodnight kiss. The hand that wasn't caressing her face, then her neck, shook – not with nerves for the first time in ages, but the sheer desire of wanting to hold her breast or smooth over the skin of her thighs underneath her skirt.

She moaned into my mouth and I realized that though this was incredible, it was a goodnight kiss and it needed to end. I pulled my lips away slowly and rested my forehead against hers. "Thank you," I said, and felt silly the second I said it, but I felt so grateful to her for giving me this chance to work things out.

She just smiled at me and softly kissed my cheek. "Goodnight, Eli," she said.

She walked me to the door and I gave her a wave before I turned down her steps. I couldn't tell her I loved her so it was easier just to be silent.

Bullfrog waved at Clare through the window, and she stayed in the front door until he pulled away. I was expecting him to ask me how the date went or make a raunchy joke about sex with Mom or how far Clare and I got, but he was uncharacteristically quiet.

He pulled up at a red light and touched my shoulder. "It's good to see you looking so happy, son."

I didn't know how to respond to that. He and I joked around all the time but we didn't usually talk about our feelings. My phone buzzed and he turned back to the road as I fished it out of my pocket to find a text message from Clare.

_Tonight was so fun. Particularly the end. Can't wait to do it again next Friday_.


	4. Your Heart is an Empty Room

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Degrassi or anything else.**

**Twitter: themusiksnob / Tumblr: musiksnob**

**So this chapter was supposed to be substantially longer than this but it ended up being absurdly long so the next scene will be the next chapter instead. That leaves this on a bit of a depressing cliffhanger. Like I have so many times before, I'm just going to ask you to trust me and remember that the epilogue of I Thought I Saw Your Face Today ended very, very happily. So we'll get there. It just might take a little while.**

**Also there's a flashback in here to kind of a cliche moment. I've written around that story a few times before, but never written it as a flashback. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but I hope you don't think it's too cliche.  
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**Sorry to give you a depressing one on the day of the Degrassi game release. I have an android phone so I haven't played it but all of the images on Tumblr are kind of killing me. I still have faith that Eclare ends up together by the end of the summer but I think the road there is going to be painful. Oh well. There's always fanfiction.**

**Thank you for reading, and especially for your reviews.**

Chapter 4

16 things. I kept glancing at the garbage bag, wondering if Clare would notice if I snuck my t-shirt with the ripped sleeve out of it. I was pretty sure that I had gotten it during the year between Julia's death and when I met Clare, which usually made things slightly easier to part with, but for some reason, I kept feeling like I was forgetting something. Like it had some significance. Like I'd regret it if it were gone.

I sat down on the bed, taking a deep breath. I hadn't spent much time in my room since I got back from the hospital. When Clare and I had started working on the room originally, our first priority was to clear off the bed so that I could start sleeping there again. But once I came home and found everything rearranged, it was too stressful, and I started crashing on the TV room couch once again.

We'd been at this for over an hour. I had vetoed almost every item she had picked up, even things I knew didn't fit Dr. Loughner's criteria for keeping them. Most of the items in the garbage were the absolute bottom of the barrel: half a cracked CD case, a gum wrapper, a blank scrap of paper. Besides the t-shirt, the only "big" thing was a magazine that I had practically torn to shreds for a collage assignment in art class last year.

Clare gave me a sympathetic look. "Four more things, Eli. I know you can do it." She watched me fiddle with a rubber band as I tried to decide if I could use it to bind together some of the things I didn't want to get rid of. She sat down next to me on the bed. "Has it gotten harder? Since you got back?"

I shrugged. "It's always been hard. Even when I was really motivated, it was hard. And the more 'easy' stuff I throw out…" I said sarcastically, wrapping the word in air quotes, "the more it's hard stuff that I need to start facing."

She looked around my room that was still teeming with stuff. "I think you're a long way from only having hard stuff left. I think we can get through a lot of this. I know it's not easy, but I'm here to help, Eli." I closed my eyes. Her voice was so beautiful even when I didn't want to hear what she was saying.

"Four more things," she reminded me, her volume increasing as her mouth moved closer to my ear. "Then you'll get yourself another chocolate kiss and then we can take a break. If you throw out four things that are bigger than a CD case, we could even stop for the day."

I laughed in spite of myself. "You know, these chocolate kisses aren't exactly as strong of an incentive as you think they are."

She bit her lip, and it took all of the willpower I had not to pull her bottom lip between my own teeth. "Four things, and we can go back to our old method of reward."

My eyebrows shot off my forehead. "A ten minute kissing break?"

Clare blushed. "I don't think I'm ready for that," she said, and I felt awful that I was pressuring her. "How about one really good kiss?"

Instead of answering, I jumped to my feet and started rustling through my piles. I glanced at her and found that she was watching me with an amused smile. "Not going to help?" I asked.

"I think you can handle it." Her bare feet were dangling over the edge of my bed and I moved toward her, just wanting to be closer to her.

"Aha!" I said, pulling a cassette tape off the floor. Duran Duran. "I'll get rid of this."

"Good," she said, holding her hand out for it so she could throw it in the garbage bag.

But before I handed it over, I checked the tracklist. Shit. Julia loved the song Rio. She used to sing it to me all the time.

I hesitated and Clare gave me her patented patient look. "Do you even have a cassette player?"

"Bullfrog does," I defended. "In his music room."

"Does Bullfrog like…" She grabbed my wrist to angle the case towards her. "Duran Duran?"

"Not really," I admitted. Which is probably why he let me steal this tape from him when he was really protective of his music collection.

"What is it, Eli?" Her patience was starting wear thin after an hour of fighting me for every last thing.

"I really like the song Rio," I explained, wanting to leave Julia out of it.

"Do you have it on Mp3? If you don't, we could get it."

I shrugged and Clare rolled her eyes. "I'll check."

She grabbed my laptop which was balanced precariously on my nightstand. I realized I hadn't turned it off the night before and hoped I hadn't left my journal entry open – or one of the websites I was looking at before I went to bed. I sat down next to her and rested my chin on her shoulder, ready to cover her eyes at any moment.

Fortunately I had closed out my browser and Clare just opened winamp to perform the search. "Here you go. Rio. Right on your computer in convenient digital form."

She held out her hand again and I hesitated. "This isn't bigger than a CD case."

She rolled her eyes. "I'll count it."

"Considering I haven't had a cassette player since I was five and Cece gave me her old walkman, I'll let you win this one."

Clare laughed. "How big of you." Her hand brushed mine as she took the tape from me. "Three more things," she reminded.

I dug around for a bit. I found that the stuff that was buried was a little easier for me to get rid of because occasionally I'd forget about it. The stuff that was on the surface was imprinted in my mind and it was hard for me to see my room without it.

I found a coloring book I had bought for my cousin a few years ago. She was about ten now and probably wouldn't be interested. I handed it to Clare without a word and she threw it out with an approving smile. "Two more things."

I looked around my room, more desperate to kiss Clare than ever before. I remembered something that I had hidden behind my dresser. "If I've got something really big, could it count for two things?"

"Maybe," she said, and I leapt to my feet. I grabbed the picture frame and turned it around to show Clare.

"What is that?" she asked, unable to control her laughter.

I glanced at the large, framed needlepoint of a puppy dog playing with a kitten. "My grandmother made it for me."

Clare's face melted. "How adorable."

"Something tells me it wouldn't fit very well between the Dead Hand and the Sex Pistols posters."

She laughed. "Not at all. But your grandmother made it for you…shouldn't you keep it?"

"It would wreck my cred with the ladies," I deadpanned.

"Well we wouldn't want that," Clare said, standing up to take the picture from me. "Although, I don't know that I like the idea of 'ladies' getting to visit your room."

"Okay, maybe only one lady," I said, taking a step closer to her. She gave me a sweet smile, and I stepped in once more. "So, since that thing is the size of about twenty CDs, does that mean I get my reward now?"

She held out a chocolate kiss. "Is this what you're looking for?" she teased.

"No," I said. I leaned down to kiss her, wrapping my hands around her slim waist to pull her closer to me. Her hands found my shoulders, and she held on with a strength that contrasted with the sweetness of the kiss. The fabric of her shirt moved with my hands and all I wanted to do was slip underneath and touch her soft skin.

But it was over in just a few moments and as she broke the kiss and took a step back, it took everything I had not to follow her. "That's it?" I asked, trying unsuccessfully to hide my disappointment.

She looked amused. "Ten more things and we can do that again."

"But…but…" I stuttered. "I thought we were done."

"We can be done if you want," she said plainly. "But if you want another kiss, you're going to have to work for it."

"You're evil," I said, though I was already starting to look around for something else to throw out.

"It wouldn't be much of a reward if I were just giving them out for free."

There was a flirty look in her eyes that I found even more appealing. I leaned my face closer to hers. "Ten more things and I'll give you a kiss so hot, you'll be begging me not to stop."

I was so close to her that I felt the shaky breath leave her mouth. "I'll help you find some things," she said, her voice a little unsteady. I was happy to hear that she didn't want to wait much longer to kiss me again either.

It was amazing what a little incentive could do. I tore the rubber band I had agonized over just minutes before from my wrist and dropped it into the bag. "1 down, 9 to go."

Clare laughed. "Somebody wants this."

"Oh, Clare, you have no idea," I said.

Her cheeks were flaming and she didn't respond. She picked up a notebook and flipped through the pages. "Geometry?" She kept flipping through. "There are a lot of blank pages in this; did you even do your homework?"

I tried to think back to freshman year. I had so many memories from that time, but school wasn't really one of them. "My teacher gave us a shit ton of homework, and yes, Clare, I did it. I probably ran out of room and had to buy that one to use for the rest of the year."

"Do you think you need these old notes?"

I would be taking precalc for the second time this year and it definitely didn't have anything to do with geometry. Besides school work wasn't high on the nostalgia list for me. "Nah, toss it. Unless you want to rip out the notes, and keep the rest for your writing." Clare always handwrote all of her stories and poems before typing them up; she had a whole shelf in her room that held her notebooks and I knew she was hiding a whole set of diaries somewhere that she wouldn't let me see. My writerly side appreciated that but my handwriting was too terrible to even consider it.

Clare's face turned into a frown as she looked at the notebook. "It's all mangled and doodled on."

I turned around to try to find something else I could part with without too much pain. It was sometimes easier not seeing the stuff go into the garbage bag. But over my shoulder, I could hear Clare flipping through the pages of the notebook, presumably double checking to make sure it was all math notes and nothing important when I heard her gasp. "Eli," she called, and I whirled around to see her trying to untangle something from the metal spiral.

She held the delicate chain out to me and my hand shook as I took it from her. My fingers wrapped around the gold Star of David pendant, pressing it into my palm. My stomach lurched as my brain forced an unwelcome memory into the forefront.

"_Where have you been?" My voice was serious, accusing._

"_Nowhere."_

"_Fuck, Julia," I roared. "It's 11 o'clock at night. You told me you were staying after school for Art Club eight hours ago. If you don't want me to know where you are, could you at least remember your fucking phone? I thought you were dead."_

"_Well, I'm not," she shot back. She threw her backpack to the ground and started rifling through the bottom drawer of my dresser where she kept her clothes._

"_You're seriously not going to tell me where you were?"_

_She glanced at me, looking nervous for the first time. "You're not going to like the answer." She continued to dig through the drawer and I noticed the new purple bruises around her wrist._

"_You went home?" I could feel the anger growing inside me, and I tried to take a deep breath and calm down. I didn't want to have a blowout fight like we usually did. I could control myself._

_She grabbed a long sleeved t-shirt and sat next to me on the bed. "Eli, I miss my father."_

"_I know Jules, but Karen…"_

_She looked uncomfortable. "I know. I know." She rubbed her wrist unconsciously and I pulled her into a hug. _

"_Next time you want to see your dad, I'll come with you. She won't touch you if I'm around."_

_She wouldn't meet my eye. "You know that won't work."_

_Her father had hated me pretty much at first sight, but things had been at least civil until he had walked in on us while I was going down on her, both of us completely naked. After that, I was no longer allowed in her house, and once things got worse between her and her stepmother and Julia decided to move in with me, he had informed me that if I ever showed up on his doorstep, he would shoot me on sight. I was pretty sure things had cooled off in the past four months and that he wouldn't actually kill me, but Julia was right. My presence would only inflame what was already a pretty volatile situation._

"_I hate the idea of you in that house." I stroked her cheek, her head still nestled against my chest. "If you want to see him, you should go out for dinner. Somewhere public, where Karen can't hurt you."_

_She pulled back immediately without a word, and picked up my geometry notebook. "How was the math?" she asked, avoiding my gaze. "I haven't started yet; could I copy yours?"_

"_Jules…?" She looked everywhere but at me. "Spit it out, Goldman."_

"_He asked me to come back home."_

"_He's asked you that before," I began before I put together the pieces of why she was acting so weird. "No. You can't."_

"_I really miss him, Eli. He's my Dad." Tears were pouring down her cheeks._

"_Fuck Julia, don't you even think?" I grabbed her arm a little more forcefully than I had intended. "You went home for one afternoon and you've already got new bruises."_

_She winced as she ripped her arm from mine. "This isn't a big deal. I can stay away from her." She pleaded with me with her eyes. "I love you, Eli but this is my family. I miss my Dad. I need to give this a shot."_

"_Goddammit, Julia!" I yelled as I threw my math book across the room. She jumped back from me wide eyed._

"_I don't want to fight about this," she said stubbornly. "My mind is made up. I told him I'd come home on Saturday, so I'd have three days to get my stuff packed up."_

_She sat back down on the bed and tried to touch me, but I cringed and pulled away. "I know you're mad, but can you just trust me? If it doesn't work out, I'll come back here, I promise. This isn't going to affect you and me, Eli. I still love you."_

"_If it doesn't work out, you'll be dead," I said bitterly. "That woman has it out for you, Jules. I don't know how many cuts and bruises you need to receive before you realize that the broken bones and hospital visits are right around the corner. And your dad is a fucking idiot for not seeing how she hurts you."_

_I saw that fiery look that fueled Julia pass through her face, but she pushed it aside immediately, and said softly, "Look Eli, we've got three more nights together, and I don't want to spend them fighting. It's late and we're both upset." She moved a little closer to me, her husky voice caressing my ear as she pushed my notebook off the bed. "Why don't we get into bed and make love and tomorrow when we're a little less emotional, we can talk to this through?"_

"_No," I said, my voice hard._

"_Eli," she chided._

"_No," I repeated. "I'm not going to sit here and pretend this is okay with me. You moved in here so you'd be safe. I'm not going to let you move back home and get yourself killed just because your father gave you a good guilt trip. You belong here with me, Jules. I can protect you."_

"_You're my boyfriend. You're not my protector."_

"_What am I supposed to do, Julia? Just sit back and watch you get killed?"_

"_You're exaggerating. It's not that bad," she said. Her finger was playing with the Star of David pendant on the necklace I had bought her to replace the one her mother had bought her when she was a child that Karen had ripped from her neck and flung out a car window during a particularly ugly argument. _

"_It's not that bad – yet," I emphasized. "And I'm pretty sure bruises over half your body and lacerations that require stitches are pretty fucking bad."_

"_She promised she wouldn't do it again. She said she's going to counseling."_

"_You're so fucking naïve. People don't change. They hurt you once, and they'll just do it again." It had been ages since Mike had popped into my brain; I'd managed to banish his image from my conscious mind. But I was feeling so raw and so dark that memories of his abuse crept up on me and I felt my stomach churning. I had to look away from Julia, not wanting her to see that I was losing my mind, not wanting her to be able to read me and know how much I was hiding from her._

"_It's a risk I have to take."_

"_You want to see your father? Fine. But don't move back in there. Go out to lunch with him every Sunday. Go over to visit and bring Caitlin and Josh as chaperones. Don't put yourself in danger for no reason. If he really wanted you to come home, he'd divorce her and you know he's not going to do that."_

"_He said he was thinking about leaving her." Julia sounded so hopeful and I hated to crush her but the thought of her leaving me was too painful._

"_He's said that before too."_

"_Fuck you, Eli." She spat. She moved until she was across the room, setting herself up for an old-fashioned duel of words instead of weapons. "Can't you just be happy for me? I just want my family back. That's all I want."_

"_I'm your family, Jules. You've got me and Cece and Bullfrog and we don't kick the shit out of you and pretend we're one happy family. Your father doesn't hit you, but he doesn't stop her from doing it so he's every bit as abusive as she is."_

_She shook her head. "This isn't right. You're not supposed to be fifteen and living with your boyfriend. Things are intense for me at home, but they are just as intense for me here, and I just…I need to give this a shot, Eli. I need some space from you and I need to make things better with my dad, and I can't do that if I'm living here."_

_I felt my heart breaking as her words registered. "So you'd rather get beat up than be with me? I'm too intense for you? Where the fuck is this coming from?"_

"_Eli, look at us. We fight all the time. We fight and we fuck and then the cycle starts again. We're too young to be this intense. If we had some space from each other, we'd both be happier."_

"_I am happy," I insisted, though my tone was full of rage. "If you're not happy, then you can get the fuck out of my house." I threw her sweater that was lying at my feet at her. "Why wait three more days if all you want to do is get away from me?"_

"_Let's talk about this in the morning," she said, trying to calm me down. "Let's just go to bed."_

"_I don't want a pity fuck," I screamed. "I don't want anything from you."_

"_You're upset," she said, as if she was trying to remind herself. "You don't mean this."_

"_Just get out," I said. I pushed past her to my closet and grabbed the small duffle bag she had brought over when she moved in. _

"_I'm not leaving you, Eli."_

"_Yes, you are," I said, knocking her bottles of perfume and girly lotion off my dresser and into her bag. "If you're not going to tell me you're staying here and not moving home, then you need to get out of here. I can't even look at you if you'd rather get abused by your stepmother than be with a guy who loves you."_

"_I can't…" she began._

"_I don't want to fucking hear it," I roared loud enough that I was shocked my parents didn't come bursting into the room. They tried to give us our privacy but this was pushing the limits of that. "It's over, Julia. I gave you everything these past few months – the past year we've been together even. But you're such a fucking stubborn bitch that you can't even appreciate it."_

"_You're right, Eli," Julia said, tearing the duffle out of my hand and shoving her clothes in as quickly as possible. "I'm a fucking bitch. Does that make you feel better?"_

"_It'll make me feel better when you come crawling back to me after she kicks the shit out of you. I only hope she doesn't kill you so I can be sure to say 'I told you so.'"_

"_What kind of a guy wants his girlfriend to get beat up so he can win an argument?"_

"_What girlfriend?" I challenged. "If you walk through that door, we're through."_

_She shook her head, still sobbing. "I can't believe you're doing this to me. I can't believe you're making me choose. I love you, Eli, but this is my family."_

"_Get out," I said. "I never want to see you again."_

_She reached up to her necklace and tore it from neck, breaking the clasp. "Don't worry," she said, throwing the necklace at my feet. "You won't."_

"Eli!" Clare screamed and I remembered I wasn't alone. I wasn't sure if I had blacked out, but when I came to my senses I discovered I had collapsed into a heap on my floor.

The necklace was cold against my palm; it was the only thing I could feel. I had spent two years scouring my room for it, wanting that piece of Julia.

I realized just how close I had come to losing it. Clare had been seconds away from throwing the notebook in the garbage.

Of course, my body would wait until I was completely conscious to wrack me with the worst panic attack I had ever had. I couldn't even move. I grabbed my chest convinced that this was a heart attack, that death was imminent. I gasped for air, feeling it swishing into my lungs but exiting without making me feel any better.

I felt Clare's hands on me but her touch didn't provide any comfort. It took all the strength I had to move my shaking hand to hers and squeeze. "Cece," I whispered.

Clare seemed to get the message but I didn't miss the look of disappointment on her face before she ran out of the room. I pulled my t-shirt away from my skin; my body felt like it was on fire as I sweated and shook. It felt like hours rather than minutes before Cece came in, holding a glass of water.

"Oh, baby boy," she said sadly. She placed the glass on my nightstand and helped me into a sitting position. She gave me the pill and I swallowed it, not even needing the water. Cece put her arm around me as she sat down in a pile of my stuff. "It's okay, baby. Mommy's here."

I collapsed onto her with my head in her lap and she rocked me back and forth as I cried. "It hurts," I said. "It hurts."

"I know, honey. I know."

"I need another pill." I hadn't felt this desperate since I found out that Clare had kissed Fitz. "It hurts so bad. I feel like I'm gonna die."

I could feel Cece's arms tighten around me. "It only takes one, baby. You'll feel better in a few minutes. Just breathe for me."

"Please," I begged.

Cece didn't let go of me, but she didn't give in to my pleas. She kept up her words of encouragement but my mind was filled with Julia. I hated myself for how I treated her, how I caused her death. The emptiness I felt afterwards.

I looked up to see Clare standing in the doorway, looking at me with an expression I couldn't interpret in my anxious, desperate state. It just reminded me that as much as Clare had been there for me lately, that she wasn't my girlfriend anymore. That I had pushed her away just like I had done to Julia. That the only woman who could hold me in her arms and tell me that she loved me was my own mother.

A second wave of panic came over me and I sobbed and gasped and shivered despite the heat. Cece rubbed my back, trying to talk me down, as I begged her for another pill.

I was stuck in my head. I kept going through my last memory of Julia – coupled with the scene of her death which I'd imagined so many times I was fairly certain I had ever detail correct. Her screams as she flew off her bike. The scenes from her life that must have flashed through her eyes before her death. The agony she suffered before she was stolen from me forever.

It was a long time before I was steady enough to sit up and take a sip of the water Cece urged me to drink.

It was a long time before I realized Clare was gone.


	5. Troubled Times

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Degrassi or anything else.**

**Twitter: themusiksnob / Tumblr: musiksnob**

**I'm sorry this took a few extra days to write. I've been suffering from some Degrassi depression lately. But rest assured, as far as Eclare goes, the last chapter was the bottom of their relationship. Things will be looking up as this progresses. (There will be some conflict of course, and one chapter will be very upsetting, but it won't be their relationship that's the issue.)**

**Thanks again for all of your support.**

Chapter 5

I was sprawled on the couch in the TV room later that night, with the lights off and the volume at a whisper. Panic attacks were draining and the worse they were, the longer the side effects lasted. Cece had forced me to eat dinner with her and Bullfrog but as soon as we finished I retreated, craving quiet.

My therapists had recommended meditation as a coping technique but I found it to be a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo bullshit. When I was stuck inside my head was when the pain was at its worst. It was better to keep my eyes tuned to this mindless TV show and shut my brain off.

My cell phone rang and I knew it was Clare before I even looked at the screen. I wasn't sure I had anything to say to her. I was worried that I'd do something to push her away even more, if I even had that opportunity. She was probably calling to tell me she couldn't handle how crazy I was and that it was over.

I figured there was no point in delaying the inevitable. "Hey," I said, feeling really awkward about the whole thing.

"Hey…can we talk?" she asked, her voice soft and sweet. It didn't really sound like she wanted to break up completely.

"Okay," I said tentatively.

I waited for her response, which seemed to take a second longer than usual. "I'm on your front steps."

"Give me a minute," I mumbled and hung up. I dragged myself off the couch. I knew my hair was probably sticking up in a million directions, but I didn't want to keep Clare waiting.

She was wringing her hands nervously on my front steps as I leaned against the doorframe. "Could I come in?" she asked.

I almost led her to the TV room but figured I already had one room tainted by an ugly break up and I didn't need another one. She followed me out the back door. Near the back fence, there was a double seated wooden swing hanging from an old child's playground, and we sat down together, her feet barely touching the ground as I pushed off lightly.

"I didn't know this was back here," she said, looking around the yard.

"Yeah, the people who lived here before us had a young kid, and they cemented this thing in so well we couldn't get rid of it. My parents put up this swing."

She nodded. She turned to me, bringing one leg up onto the swing and tucking her ankle under her other knee, which brought us into closer proximity than I would have expected. "Eli, I'm sorry."

Her tone was sweet and genuine, and I let out a sigh of relief that her follow up wouldn't be, "but I think we should break up."

"Okay," I said, not really sure how to respond.

"I shouldn't have left earlier. It was wrong of me."

"Why did you leave?" I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer.

She bit her lip and looked at the ground, avoiding my gaze. "I was scared. I've been there when you've had panic attacks before, but it was never like that. You just collapsed and you didn't respond and I thought you had blacked out. And I didn't know what to do; I just stood there like an idiot until you pulled yourself out of it just enough to tell me to get Cece."

Her voice broke as tears started streaming down her face, "And then I just watched as you shook and cried and begged her for another pill and there wasn't anything I could do. It hurt so much to see you in that much pain. So I waited until I was sure you were going to be okay and I left."

"How okay do you think I felt when I realized you were gone?"

She cringed. "I know, I know. I'm sorry." She took a deep breath. "This is going to sound so awful."

"Just say it."

"I felt like you didn't need me." I narrowed my eyes at her, trying to figure out what she meant. "It's just…you asked for Cece, and then she was the one who comforted you and made you feel better, and I just felt like I was in the way. I didn't know how to help you and she did, so I left. And I've been miserable ever since, knowing that I did the wrong thing, but not really sure what would have been the right thing."

For the first time in a while, I felt like Clare was being completely honest with me – and that, more than anything, made me feel better. "Clare, when I asked for Cece I wanted her to bring me my pills. I would have asked for Jesus himself if I thought he was holding."

Her grin was so brief I almost missed it. "I thought you were trying not to take the pills anymore."

"I'm trying not to _abuse_ the pills anymore," I clarified.

"What's the difference?"

"Look, if I could somehow manage to keep myself from thinking about my room, or Julia, or Mike, or Fitz," – 'or you,' I added silently in my head – "I could quit cold turkey, no problem. I was never taking the pills to get high or feel numb. On a good day, they never even cross my mind."

"But on a bad day?"

"They're the only thing that make me feel better."

She looked nervous. "I kind of thought they were a temporary thing. Like you need them right now, but eventually, you'll get better and you won't."

"Well, that's the goal, obviously. It would be amazing if I could cope without them. But the thing about anxiety disorders is that they don't just go away."

I realized this conversation was going to take us somewhere we weren't quite ready to go. But at the same time, if there was no chance of us getting there, it was better to know now.

"Everything I'm doing now, with the therapy and the coping techniques…it's going to help. It'll take some time, but I'm going to get to the point where I don't always end up having a panic attack or a nightmare or irrational anxiety about everything. I won't always need to take a pill to feel better."

"But the problem is," I continued, "I may never be totally better. The attacks will probably lessen in frequency or intensity, but it's probably something I'm going to struggle with my whole life. And I'm hoping to get to the point where I can control my medication myself, when I can take the pills freely in the correct way without someone's intervention."

I took a deep breath, afraid that after everything we had been through, this would be the thing that finally pushed her away. "What I'm trying to say is: this isn't going away. So if this scares you too much, if it's too intense, I'll understand if you have to walk away. I don't want to pressure you about the future, but there's a chance that if things worth out between us, someday it could be you controlling my pills rather than Cece. Or you'll be the person who has to explain to our children why Daddy collapsed on the floor because he was triggered by a bad memory. And if that's not something you think you could deal with in this completely hypothetical future, maybe we should just agree to be friends and go on our separate ways."

I cringed as I waited for Clare's response. I practically just proposed to her and asked her to take care of me for the rest of my life. I mean, I would like to spend the rest of my life with her, but really, I just wanted her to know what the reality of life with me would be like.

She reached over to me and tucked my hair behind my ear, her finger grazing my cartilage piercing. "Well, I can't promise you that I'll marry you and have your babies, but that's not because of your anxiety disorder. It's because I'm sixteen and I have no idea what the future holds. But I can promise you that I am here right now, and I'm not going anywhere."

"I want to believe that," I said softly. "But you left me, Clare. I was at the lowest point since my accident, and you left."

"This is new for me too," she said. "And I want to be there for you, but I don't always know how. I'm going to make mistakes, Eli. I left you, but I came back. And next time, I won't leave."

It was moments like this that made me remember why Clare and I weren't back together, despite the fact that we obviously had feelings for each other. We still hadn't quite figured out the trust aspect of our relationship, and even though she had many more reasons to be wary of me, I couldn't quite get over the fact that when things got difficult she pulled away.

"Okay," I said, not really sure what else there was to say.

"Next time, what should I do?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

She put her hand on my arm. "If you're having a panic attack…what can I do to help you?"

"Well, if it's as bad as it was today, you should get my pills from Cece."

"What if it's not that bad? Or what if she's not around?"

I tried to think of what would be the best answer. "Well, you should try to stay calm…and you could hold me."

"Like Cece did?"

I laughed. "Well, it's completely different when she does it, but yeah, that would work." Clare rolled her eyes, and I smiled at her. "You should just talk to me. Just be calm and reassuring. You could even tell me a story, just something to keep my mind occupied." A thought occurred to me. "I don't see Dr. Martin anymore, but maybe you could come with me to see Dr. Loughner. He could give you some tips. I'm not really an expert on this either. It's new to me too."

"I could do that," she said.

Clare's support meant the world to me. "But mostly, try to hug me. I might try to push you off at first, but there's something comforting about being held; it definitely makes a difference from times I've been on my own." I thought of something that Dr. Martin had mentioned and laughed. "Apparently, skin to skin contact is the best kind."

I wiggled my eyebrows at her and she smacked my arm. "So I'll be sure to put my hands on you," she said.

"I can think of some places I'd like you to put your hands."

The sun was on its way down, but I could still see the blush on her cheeks. "I think I'll stick to your arms. Or your face." There was a hint of a smirk on her face. "Maybe if you're feeling really bad, I'll hug you under your shirt."

"I've never wished for a panic attack before, but that sounds pretty nice. Any chance I could hug you under yours?"

She sat forward on the swing, pushing us into motion with her feet. "We're taking things slow for a reason, Eli," she reminded me.

"It was worth a shot," I teased, wanting her to know I wasn't too serious about this. Though it sounded like a really great idea.

We swung back and forth silently for a few minutes. It felt comfortable, companionable. I put my arm around the back of the swing, and Clare sat back and let out a sigh. "It's beautiful out tonight."

I just watched her, knowing most of the beauty came from having her sitting next to me.

"Are you okay?" she asked a few moments later. "You're still so tense."

She reached for my balled up fist. I opened it for her; Julia's necklace sat in the palm of my hand. Clare reached out and ran her finger over my palm, following the lines of the pendant.

"I've been looking for this for two year," I admitted gruffly.

"Maybe it'll help that you've found it. You won't be so afraid that if you throw something out you'll miss it."

I snorted. "Or maybe I'll be too terrified to throw anything out in case something important is stuck inside."

"We can try again next week," she said. "We can aim for ten things. Take it slow."

She laced our fingers together, pressing the necklace in between our hands.

"Eli, were you an atheist before Julia died?"

"Yeah," I said. "Or maybe more agnostic then. I don't know. I've never really been a believer."

She smiled. "I don't know if Julia was observant or anything, but I just think it's funny that your two girlfriends wore religious symbols around their neck when you're so anti-religion."

I laughed. "Well, she wasn't exactly a saint…or whatever the Jewish equivalent of saints is. But she definitely believed a hell of a lot more than I did. She only went to temple on High Holidays, but she helped Cece and Bullfrog throw a kickass Purim party."

She took the necklace from my hand, examining the broken clasp. "What happened?" she asked tentatively.

I told her the story, leaving out as many details as I could. My voice got a little unsteady toward the end, but I managed to avoid getting too upset. "And then she ripped off the necklace and threw it at me, and then she was gone."

Clare seemed to understand what I meant by that. "I'm sorry," she said softly.

She placed the necklace back in my hand, and reached behind her own neck to unclasp her chain. "What are you doing?"

She slid the cross pendant off and replaced it with Julia's Star of David. "We could go shopping this weekend and find you a chain that's a little less girly. But this will work in the meantime." She reached around my neck and clasped the necklace back together.

I picked up the pendant and looked at it. For all of the times I saw it lying on Julia's chest, and for how much I had missed it when it was gone, I had never really thought of wearing it myself. "This feels kind of weird," I admitted.

She smiled. "I spend so much time trying to convince you that physical objects don't all have meaning. But this one does. And it's a nice way for you to keep a piece of her close to your heart." Her hand rested on my chest, and I tangled our fingers together.

The tension was all gone now.


	6. Til I Hear It From You

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Degrassi or anything else.**

**Twitter: themusiksnob / Tumblr: musiksnob**

**This is long enough so I'll just get to it. Thank you for reading and please considering leaving a review. It helps a lot to have your support.**

**This takes place a few weeks after the last chapter.  
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Chapter 6

I wasn't in the greatest mood when I walked out of Dr. Loughner's office but when I discovered Cece's car wasn't in the parking lot and checked my phone to find a text saying she had been called into work and I'd need to take the bus home, I was livid. There was nothing like sitting on a bus for 30 minutes to remind you how much better it was to have a driver's license, and that was before the 20 minute walk home from the Queen Street Station.

By the time I returned home, I was sweaty, cranky, and extra pissed once I saw Bullfrog's car in the driveway. I had texted him but he never remembered to charge his phone and they had gotten rid of our landline to save money the year before.

I stomped up the stairs without saying anything to him. I had my shirt over my head before I reached my room and stripped down to my boxers, deciding a shower was the only solution.

Unfortunately, as the hot water beat down on my skin, I couldn't get my counseling session out of my head. I was too depressed to use my usual method of distracting myself – imagining Clare naked while I jerked off – and with Bullfrog home, I couldn't use the backup method of singing embarrassing songs at the top of my lungs.

When I left the mental hospital, I had signed papers allowing my medical records to be transferred to Dr. Loughner. I had the option to keep going back for outpatient therapy, but between the distance and the fact that group therapy was much less useful to me than one on one sessions, I opted to keep seeing my regular therapist. At our first session I had apologized to him for my outburst at the last meeting we had before my accident, and he had seemed pleased at the progress I had made.

For weeks, we had focused on the usual topics: my medication, my panic attacks, the hoarding. I had kept him apprised of my relationship with Clare and he seemed to think our slow progression to getting back together was a good thing. I had left each of our sessions feeling a sense of accomplishment – that I was on the right track, that I was starting to get better. I was throwing things out and I was taking my meds responsibly with Cece's help. I was starting to trust Clare again and I had managed to not give her any more reasons not to trust me.

But this time, he had finally brought up the topic of Mike. I knew that Dr. Martin's notes would have explained the situation to him and I was glad not to have to tell that story again in full. But Dr. Loughner was pressing me to tell my parents the truth about what happened to me. I had set up a group therapy session with my parents at the end of my stay at the hospital, but I wasn't able to tell them. In fact, the situation had freaked me out so much that I had to be medicated, which was something I had been able to avoid throughout much of my stay.

Dr. Loughner wanted me to tell them. Clare wanted me to tell them.

I just wanted to never think about it again.

I stayed in the shower until the hot water ran out.

I got dressed in a pair of sweats and an old gray t-shirt, figuring I probably wouldn't go out for the rest of the day and lay down on my bed. I was trying to get more comfortable in my room. Clare had come over and helped me clean three times since we found Julia's necklace, and I had spent a little of my free time rearranging things so it was as close as I could get it to the way it was before the accident. I had even thrown out a handful things on my own, which I hadn't been possible for me before. I figured it was probably time for me to start sleeping in my room again, rather than the TV room.

I heard a knock at my door and didn't respond, but Bullfrog came in anyway.

"Your mom called. She had to work so we're on our own for dinner tonight."

"Yeah, I'm aware."

"You want pizza or Chinese?"

"Pizza," I said, hoping he'd leave me alone.

He clearly didn't get the hint because he walked farther into my room and sat down on the bed. Cece came in pretty often, sometimes to grab my laundry or change my sheets and sometimes to check up on me or help me clean. I couldn't remember the last time Bullfrog had set foot in here. It may have been junior high. Certainly before Julia started crashing with us.

"There was a message from Dr. Loughner as well," he continued.

The last time Dr. Loughner called he informed my parents I was trying to get more pills since I had taken all of mine. That conversation hadn't gone well. I wasn't sure what issue he was having with me now. I hoped he wasn't trying to set up a group therapy meeting without my permission. I told him I wasn't ready to tell them; he should respect that.

"He was asking if you need a refill on your anxiety meds," Bullfrog said. Dr. Martin had only given me a month's supply of pills with no refills so that I couldn't abuse them like I had last time. "I had to go to the safe and check the bottle since I've never gotten any for you. There's over half a bottle in there."

"Yeah, well, it's easy not to take them when I don't know the combination," I muttered.

Bullfrog laughed. "The combo's not that hard. If I were you, I would have found a way in there already."

I shrugged. I hadn't even thought about breaking in. "Well, I'm trying to do the right thing."

"You know, I'm really proud of you," Bullfrog said. I sat up, wondering where this way coming from. He and I had always been close but it was always joking or arguing about music or joining forces to tease Cece. He'd said those words to me when I graduated from grade eight, when I won third place in a Battle of the Bands at my old school, when I got a B in chemistry even though science was my worst class. But it wasn't a frequent occurrence, and it was never about something so serious.

"I know how hard it is to overcome an addiction," he continued. "And I know for certain that I wasn't strong enough to do that when I was your age. But Dr. Loughner is convinced you've made a lot of progress, and I can see it too, kid."

"Thanks," I said softly, wondering where he was going with this. His accusation that I was an addict was still the only actual conversation we'd had about his own drug use. He gave me one "Don't do drugs" speech when I was around 12: "You can smoke pot every now and then but not too often, because potheads are boring. Don't do anything harder than that or I'll kick your ass."

I had spent most of the day battling that low level of anxiety that didn't produce a panic attack but didn't really go away and I had been feeling that craving for the peace the pills provided more than I had in a while. I wondered if Bullfrog had any ways of coping. My shrinks had all sort of ideas, but they all came from the ivory tower; none of them had battled addictions themselves.

Bullfrog was starting to stand up and I realized just how much I wanted to have this conversation with him, despite how out of character it was for both of us. "You were my age when you started using?"

He looked at me curiously and sat back down. "A little older. I was out of high school."

"What happened?"

"I moved to Toronto the day after graduation and moved into this shitty apartment that I shared with five other guys. I started bartending to pay rent while I played in any band that would take me, until I met Steve and Tony and we started getting serious." He laughed. "You've heard the stories of my old glory days."

I knew Bullfrog's band had one hit single in the mid-80s that had made it big in Canada and crossed over to at least the college rock stations in the States. But I was pretty sure I was missing out on a lot of the details. "I think you glossed over the less than glorious moments."

He shook his head. "You're right about that. Not too proud of the way I acted back then."

"Will you tell me?" I sat cross legged, folding my hands and hiding them in my lap in hopes that he wouldn't notice how much they were shaking.

He looked less than pleased. "Well, things were fine when we were recording the album and when we were mostly playing shows in Toronto. I mean, I was drinking too much, that's for sure, but that's not too unusual for a 19 year old who didn't have all that much direction in their life. That's around when I started doing coke, but it was just an occasional thing, something I did at parties to get high. Even if I wanted to do it more, and I really didn't at that point, I could barely afford food, let alone drugs. Most of the time we got drunk off bottles of Jack Daniels that we stole from the bar we worked at since the owner never really checked up on us."

"Drugs and petty theft? You were such a model citizen," I teased.

"Ugh, it only gets worse."

He looked hesitant again, so I reassured him, "I can handle it."

"Our record contract was kind of shit because the company didn't expect us to do well. So they paid us like no money up front, but there were all these bonuses if we sold a certain amount of records. When the song blew up, the cash was pouring in and they decided to milk us for all the money they could get by sending us on tour."

The song. Bullfrog refused to name it because he said he had played it too many times in his life to ever get it out of his head if he said the name out loud, but I had heard him play it on the radio once or twice when he was covering the two a.m. show, never mentioning that he was the drummer.

"I thought you liked touring?" I asked.

"I liked performing. I liked drumming and I liked the crowd. If I could have made a living as musician without leaving Toronto, I probably never would have changed careers. But touring sucks. You're stuck on a bus with these guys who you started as friends with but by the end you all hate each other. You play shows every night until midnight, then there's an after party, then you get on a bus and drive through the night until the next city. There's no downtime; there's always someone around – wanting your autograph or an interview, wanting something from you. And in spite of that, when you're not onstage, it's boring as hell, so you find ways to occupy your time that aren't all that great."

"I didn't realize you hated it so much." Usually when Bullfrog got nostalgic, it sounded like he missed it, that being a rockstar was more fun than being a regular radio DJ – or a Dad.

"Well, there were benefits," he smirked. "I mean, getting your cock sucked on a regular basis by different women in each city is pretty fucking awesome."

"And now that sounds like Bullfrog," I said, rolling my eyes. In my effort to stop imagining women on my dad's junk, I flashed back to the last time that happened to me and cringed as I remembered Clare's guilt-ridden attempt.

"But in order for that to happen, I had to be the life of the party. So I'd stay up all night getting wasted, attempt to sleep on the bus – which was just about impossible between the booze and the insomnia, and then have to get up and do it again the next night. The adrenaline carries you through the shows for a while, but after a while, the only thing that kept me alive and functioning was the coke. So I'd do it before the shows so I could perform, and keep doing it after for the party."

"How long did that go on for?"

"The tour went on for almost a year, and then I kept using until I ran out of money. And that meant I had to do the worst thing I've ever had to do."

My eyes widened as I thought of all the possibilities. He leaned closer to me. "I moved home with my parents."

I threw my skull pillow at him. "You asshole. I thought you were going to tell me that you sucked dick for coke or something."

"Trust me, that probably would have been better than moving home with my parents." I knew my grandfather was still alive, but the last time I had seen him was at my grandma's funeral when I was six or seven. Bullfrog refused to see him after that point. I didn't know exactly what the problem was but it was a far cry from the close relationship I had with Cece's parents, Bubbe and Pop Pop.

"What was so bad about that?"

He grimaced. "It wouldn't have been good under any circumstances. My dad thought I was worthless. He didn't think music was a career and he thought I was an idiot. Then I came home, broke and addicted, and just proved him right."

"Did Grandma help you at all?"

He laughed. "Well, eventually. She was so in denial at first that she did everything but hand the dealer the money. But she figured out I was stealing from them and she found my stash, and then she shipped me out to rehab."

"So that's when you got clean?"

Bullfrog laughed ruefully. "I had 21 days sober and walked out of the rehab and used the money I was supposed to spend on bus fare back home to buy enough for one line."

Wow. I couldn't believe how bad he had gotten. "Did you go back home?"

"I crashed with my bandmates. We started recording the second album right away, and I was okay when we were in the studio but as soon as we left, I'd get high. It took a few months, but even I had to admit I had a problem at that point and tried rehab again on my own." He gritted his teeth. "My record company pulled me out before I was finished because they didn't want to cancel tour dates. People bought tickets because they liked the first album, but the second tanked and the dates at the end of the tour had a lot fewer people at them."

"So they're the reason you kept using?" I asked incredulously.

"I can't blame them. I wasn't ready yet."

"What made you ready?"

He smiled. "I met your mom."

I gave him a sideways glance. For all that he and Cece loved to reminisce, I actually wasn't sure how they met. "How did you know that she was the one? Was it love at first sight?"

"Practically. The tour was over and the band was breaking up and it was the night before our farewell show. We were back in Toronto and I had about a month before I needed to find a new place to live, since Steve wanted to marry Marissa and was kicking me out. I was looking at this apartment on Queen Street, this absolutely perfect place, trying to figure out how I could afford it since I had snorted most of my money away again, when Cece walked in."

Bullfrog had the biggest smile on his face. "Of course, she immediately fell in love with the apartment too, and was about to make the landlord an offer. I wanted the apartment and I couldn't let that happen, so I persuaded her to come get dinner with me and think things over."

You could hear the difference in his voice when he talked about Cece. I wondered if Clare ever sounded like that when she talked about me.

"We talked for hours, so long that the waiter finally had to kick us out, and then we sat outside in her car for another few. She was so unlike all of the women I'd been with since I started touring. She was just full of heart and opinions and so down to earth, and I just knew I never wanted to let her go."

There was an impish look on his face that worried me a little. "She drove me back to Steve's house and she…"

"Dad!" I interrupted. "I don't want to know."

"She kissed me, Eli. She gave me the most amazing kiss of my entire life, so amazing that 23 years later, I still can remember ever single second of it in perfect detail." He paused for a second, thinking, and then asked me, "Have you ever had one of those kisses?"

I felt like I was lucky enough to have two: the kiss that Julia gave me the first time we had sex and the kiss I gave Clare in the library that was equal amounts surprising, loving, and sexy. But as much as he'd opened up to me, I felt those were too personal to share, so I just nodded, hoping he'd continue his story.

"I invited her to the last show the next night and she was there in the front row, and I felt like I was playing just for her. I had talked about her non-stop all day and the guys even let me come out from behind the kit and sing the only song I ever wrote for the band. It was kind of a shit song, and I had to switch out Jenny for Cece, but I sang it straight to her."

"And then you lived happily ever after?"

He shook his head sadly. "And then I went to the after party and went on the biggest bender in history."

"What did Cece think about that?" I knew my mom had her wild days, but while I could completely imagine Bullfrog getting wasted and crazy, I was really hoping he wasn't going to tell me Cece joined in.

"She stuck around for a little while, but she thought I was looking for a groupie and not a girlfriend and that I was just another addict, and she left. I was so messed up I didn't even notice she was gone, but once I did…" I could hear the tears in his voice. "I called her for days. When she finally picked up, I convinced her to meet me and we talked."

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. "I'm not going to tell you your mom's story; you'll have to hear it from her. But she told me her groupie days were behind her. She was in nursing school and she was making something of herself and she was done dating wasted losers like me. And I asked her to give me 21 days and went back to rehab."

"And it worked that time?"

Bullfrog looked proud. "I've been clean for 23 years."

I knew cocaine and anxiety pills were two different kinds of monster, but I couldn't imagine not taking one for twenty three years. Just the thought of being 40 and having a panic attack made me a little shaky.

I realized there was one detail he had left out. "Hey, who got the apartment?"

He laughed. "Your mom did, of course. Though I didn't really have anywhere to live when I got out of rehab, so I basically moved in with her anyway. I was supposed to be crashing on a friend's couch, but he was still using and Cece didn't want me around it."

Bullfrog looked more relaxed now and I felt comfortable asking him a few more questions. "Was it just coke or…?"

"Mainly. I tried pretty much everything once. Except heroin. Probably the luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that we never really made the big time because there was never enough money for heroin. But coke was my drug of choice."

There was a lot more I was curious about. "My therapists keep telling me that I shouldn't drink because they're afraid I'm going to become an alcoholic. But you drink…"

"I know a lot of addicts can't control themselves when it comes to alcohol, but I can. It's never been a problem for me. If it ever became a problem with my life or my marriage, I'd stop and go back to rehab for it. But I can have two beers and not have any desire to have more. I could never do that with coke. Two lines were never enough."

I nodded. I was thinking I might be the same way. I already drank way less than the average teenager; I'd been drunk a handful of times, but I didn't usually binge drink the way Drew and the guys at the ravine did. And aside from smoking pot with Julia once or twice, I'd never really wanted to try any other drugs.

"Did it get easier? Or do you still wish you could use?" I grabbed onto my pillow so I could hide my hand which was shaking once again.

"Does it get easier? Yes, definitely. Does it go away completely? Not even close." He laughed. "I was at a radio event last year and a guy was doing lines in the men's bathroom, and I literally had to go outside and walk around the building before I could go back into the event, let alone the bathroom. Twenty three years and I practically had to call my N.A. sponsor."

"What stopped you?"

"The same thing that stopped me all those years ago: Cece. I couldn't risk disappointing her." He leaned over and ruffled my hair. "And you. I know what it's like to grow up with a shitty father, and I know I'm not perfect but you deserve better. And I can't be better for you if I'm fucked up all the time."

I turned away, not wanting to start crying over this. "It's really hard," I said finally. "I want to do the right thing, but I don't know if I can."

"I know you can," he said simply. "And so does your mom, and so does Video-Game-Kid."

I laughed, wiping at my eyes a little. "His name is Adam."

"I know, but Video-Game-Kid just has a nice ring to it." His tone turned serious. "How are things with you and Clare?"

"Good, I guess." Besides our cleaning sessions, we'd stuck to the Friday night date routine, and they had gone really well. We had gone to the movies twice and one night she had come over here for dinner with me and Cece. We had plans for a trip to Wasaga Beach that Saturday with Alli and Sav that we were both looking forward to. I hadn't really been back to her house since her Dad went on a lot of business trips during the summer so her mom was there more than usual, and she hadn't quite convinced her mom that I was trustworthy yet, but I was hoping that would change soon.

"She's been over a lot. And I may have accidentally seen a goodbye kiss on our front porch that looked like a lot more than a friendship kiss. Are you guys back together?"

"Not exactly," I said. "But we're getting there."

"I don't see what the hold up is. Unless you're finally realizing that having blue balls for the next ten years isn't what you want in a relationship."

I rolled my eyes. "It's not about sex. We just have a lot of trust issues to work through right now."

Bullfrog looked confused. "I can see why Clare might have trouble trusting you. But why would you not trust her?"

I bit my lip. I hadn't told either Cece or Bullfrog the entire story before. "She cheated on me."

"She cheated on you?" Bullfrog repeated in surprise. "You mean, she slept with someone else? That doesn't sound like the Clarabelle I know."

"No, but…" I took a deep breath. "She kissed Fitz."

"Fitz? Fitz, who almost stabbed you?" Bullfrog shook his head. "Before the accident?"

"Yeah."

"Wow…that's…" He fumbled for words. "How did that happen?"

I cringed. I hated thinking about this. "She was upset and he comforted her, and then he kissed her."

Bullfrog cocked his head at me. "That's it?"

"That fits the definition of cheating," I said stubbornly.

"Only in the strictest sense of the word." Bullfrog reached over and put his hand on my shoulder. "Eli, she was upset and he kissed her. He initiated it."

"She kissed him back," I pouted. I knew I was being pathetic, but every time I thought about this, the hurt and anger returned.

"For what? Ten seconds?" Bullfrog punched me in the arm. "There are bigger things in a relationship to worry about. If she didn't sleep with him, you need to get over it."

"Did you ever cheat on Mom?" I asked, accusingly.

"Shouldn't you be asking if she ever cheated on me?"

"Well, I know the answer to that question is no," I spat.

Bullfrog looked hurt. But he responded, "One time. When we tried to reform the band a year later, a groupie threw herself at me after the show. And I kissed her back for a little bit but then she tried to undo my belt buckle, and I realized if I did this, I was throwing away everything I had, and I stopped it." My eyes widened and he sighed. "It was over 20 years ago, Eli. It was a mistake."

"Does Mom know?" I asked, terrified that I'd have to keep this secret from her.

"I went home and told her that very night."

"What did she say?"

"Never again," he said. "And it never happened again."

"She must have really trusted you," I said.

"She did. She does," he said. "And I deserved it a lot less than Clare does."

"I know, I know," I said.

"Look, I know I don't really understand your relationship with Clare. But I think she's really good for you. You were so unhappy for so long after Julia. Even when you were with her, you guys were always fighting. You and Clare...there's something between you two." He smiled. "It sort of reminds me of me and Cece."

"Really?"

He laughed. "Yeah. She's the strong calming type, and you're the passionate, intense one. Julia kind of reminds me of my high school girlfriend as well. Kind of odd but I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

I looked down at my hands. I decided to ignore the Julia comment; I'd been thinking about the past too much today. "I'd really…I'd love it if Clare and I were still together 23 years from now."

"And happy, too," Bullfrog said. "Though I suspect that has a lot to do with how much sex we're having."

"Ugh, gross," I said.

"I have to give you a lot of credit for that, though. Most guys would see that purity ring on her finger and run the other way."

I shrugged. "It's certainly not my favorite thing about her. She's not a total prude, so it's not too bad. Or at least it wasn't before we broke up." I looked up at him and held his gaze. "She's worth it, though. I love her. She means more to me than sex ever could."

He nodded. "As someone who's had a lot of meaningless sex in his life, I know exactly what you mean." He clapped my back. "You've at least seen her naked, right?"

I smirked. "Oh yeah."

"She's got a pretty nice rack," he said and I punched him in the shoulder.

"Stop checking out my girlfriend, you perv."

"Your girlfriend, eh?" he joked, standing up and moving away from me before I could hit him again.

"Soon enough," I said. I knew we wouldn't need much longer – or at least, I wouldn't. "Then at least we can start fooling around again."

"You really think she's going to be able to wait until she's married?" he asked, stepping over a pile of shoeboxes.

I thought back to when Clare and I were together, her looking naked and flushed and happy after the orgasms she had let me give her with my hands on so many occasions. "Probably not." I grinned as he stumbled, his arms flailing. He managed to keep himself from falling over and took a small bow before walking toward the door.

"Hey, Dad," I said, and he stopped in the doorway. I wanted to tell him how he'd been such a great father to me, much better than his own had been to him, and how proud I was that he'd been able to stay clean for so long, and how much this conversation meant to me.

"Thanks," was all I was able to say.

He smiled, hearing my unspoken words. "Let me go order the pizza."


	7. In Your Arms

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Degrassi or anything else.**

**Twitter: themusiksnob / Tumblr: musiksnob**

**Thank you again for your many lovely reviews. I'm glad you liked the Bullfrog chapter. **

Chapter 7

Clare and I were finishing up a really nice dinner at Little Miss Steaks, when the waiter brought over the check. "Yoink," Clare said as she grabbed it.

"You're treating me?" I asked with an eyebrow raised. "It's not even my birthday." Clare and I used to take turns paying for each other back when we were together, though I usually tried to make sure I took care of the special occasions. But since we'd been dating more casually, we'd been splitting things 50/50 or paying for ourselves.

"Well, it was my night to pick what we did, and I couldn't come up with anything better than going out to dinner, so yes, it's my treat." She folded a few bills into the check holder and left it at the end of the table. "Besides, you deserve a nice reward for how much progress you've been making in your room."

"How about I pay for dinner and you give me a different reward?" I wiggled my eyebrows at her.

She blushed and scooted out of the booth without responding. I followed her out of the restaurant, watching her hips sway with a sexiness that I knew was completely unintended.

It was so hard to be around her and hold back. If I had thought about trying to get Clare to kiss me before we had started dating, it was nothing compared to now. I knew what her mouth felt like on mine, the exact line of the curve of her hip, the feeling of her fingernails grazing the skin on my back, the gasp she released when I slid my fingers inside of her.

Being around her but not being able to kiss her whenever I wanted was torture.

Clare fortunately didn't notice that I was lusting after her. "It's still early. What do you want to do?" she asked, stopping in front of the restaurant.

"Ice cream?"

She wrinkled her nose. "I'm stuffed. Bookstore?"

There were already way too many books cluttering my room, and it felt like a crime to throw out books. "I checked out a whole stack of books from the library so I'm set for a while. But if you want to...?"

"Nah, just a thought."

We walked down the street in companionable silence until we got to the corner where we would split to go to our separate houses – though if Clare decided to go home, I'd walk her.

"I'd invite you over, but my mom's home," she said.

I frowned. I wasn't sure what I'd need to do to make Mrs. Edwards tolerate me again. "You could come over my house. I'm sure Cece could give you a ride home later."

"Sounds great," she smiled, and I couldn't dwell on the situation with her mother when Clare was looking at me like that. She slipped her hand into mine as we walked down the street together.

Her phone buzzed and I was worried it was her mother asking her to come home. "It's Alli," she said as she read the text. "Sav's going to pick me up at nine tomorrow and then we'll come get you."

"Nine on a Saturday? That's so early," I grumbled.

"Well, it's a two hour drive up to Wasaga Beach, so we need to get going early or we'll lose the whole day."

That's exactly why I thought we should make it an overnight trip but neither Clare's parents nor the Bhandaris seemed to agree with me.

"It's still early."

"Pack your stuff tonight, and you won't have to get up as early."

Yeah, yeah, yeah. "I bet you've already got your bag waiting next to the front door."

Clare giggled. "Of course." I shook my head. She was almost too organized for me. "You'll appreciate me tomorrow when you forget to bring sun block because you were half asleep when you packed your bag."

I laughed. "Yeah, definitely wouldn't have remembered that." I wondered if Clare would let me rub the lotion into her skin. I wondered just how much skin her bathing suit would show. "Did you get a new bathing suit?"

Clare's cheeks flushed. "I got two actually. Alli helped me pick them out."

I thought about the way Alli used to dress pre-uniform, and wondered if she might have influenced Clare to buy something a little bit sexy. "One piece or two?"

"One of each," she said.

"Awesome," I said, unable to contain myself. "Which one are you going to wear?"

"I don't know yet," she said, a little embarrassed.

I squeezed her hand, not wanting to pressure her any more. "I know you'll look beautiful in whatever you wear. Just like you do tonight."

"Thank you," she said softly. She was wearing a flowered button down blouse over a denim skirt; it was a typical Clare outfit, nothing special, but as usual, she looked radiant.

Things were quiet again but I thought everything was fine until I noticed the nervous expression on Clare's face. I knew my compliment couldn't have frazzled her that much and wondered what was going through her mind. I didn't want to push, but I was starting to get anxious as she stiffened up slightly next to me.

"Everything okay, Clare?"

She gave a short, unconvincing laugh. "Of course, this has been great. Our dates always are."

I bumped her hip with mine, hoping to lighten the mood. "Spit it out, Edwards."

She sighed. "I was just trying to decide if I should ask Cece for one of your anxiety pills. Since we'll be gone for so long tomorrow. Just in case you need one."

I dropped her hand and stopped walking. I couldn't believe she had thought of doing that. I couldn't believe she didn't trust me. "I'll be fine, Clare," I said sharply. "Trips to the beach aren't exactly terror inducing."

"I know. I just…" she stuttered. "I'm sorry." She looked really remorseful. "I'm just trying to look out for you."

As annoyed as I was, I knew Clare meant well. It was just that now that the thought was planted in my head, I was feeling anxious about our trip for the first time. I tried to keep myself calm and fight through the feeling.

"I haven't taken a pill in almost two weeks," I said. I tried to ignore her look of surprise. "I've been doing really well."

"That's good, Eli. I'm really glad to hear that." She hesitated for a second, then held out her hand again. "I'm sorry I doubted you. I really only meant it just in case."

I took her hand and gave it a squeeze. "If I'm feeling anxious tomorrow morning, I'll ask Cece to give you a pill. But I think I'll be okay."

We had just reached my front steps and she jumped up so that we were at the same eye level. "I don't know. If I end up wearing my bikini, your heart will be racing so fast you might need a way to calm down," she said, biting her lip in a nervous tic that just made me want to kiss her even more. I knew she was trying to tease me and lighten the mood, but she only succeeded in turning me on.

I led her into the house, wishing I could drag her up to my room and tear her clothes off, but figuring we could hang out in the TV room for a little while and find something to watch on Netflix streaming. We found Cece and Bullfrog curled up together on the couch.

"Oh no, the kids are home," Bullfrog said, and Cece pushed his shoulder.

"You can join us if you want," Cece said. "We're just watching True Blood."

I glanced at the TV and saw that Anna Paquin's breasts were prominently displayed on screen. "Clare does love vampires," I said, unable to tear my eyes away.

"My parents don't let me watch this show," Clare said, tugging on my hand. When I didn't move, she tugged on my hand even harder. Bullfrog and Cece exchanged amused expressions.

"Have fun," Bullfrog said.

I followed Clare up to my room, fully expecting to have to apologize for ogling another woman's breasts when she slammed the door shut, pushed me up against it, and kissed me with a ferocity I was not expecting.

We'd shared a few kisses over the past month, but they were goodnight kisses or reward kisses, sweet and way too short and just dancing on the edge of passionate.

This was something else entirely.

I ripped my lips from her, panting as I tried to catch my breath after her surprise attack. "Clare, what are you…?" I tried to ask, but I couldn't even get the whole sentence out before she kissed me again, her tongue forcing her way into my mouth and stroking mine deeply. I let out a low moan, but she didn't pull away at all. She wound her fingers into my hair and tugged my face closer to hers.

I pressed my palms into the door, afraid to put them on her body. I wanted to touch her everywhere, and I wasn't really sure where this was going. She clearly didn't have the same hesitance. She smoothed over my shoulders and my chest and in a move that almost killed me, she stood on her tiptoes and placed a trail of open mouth kisses down my neck, stopping to suck hard enough that I had no doubt she had marked me.

My mouth was unoccupied, but I still struggled to speak. "Are you sure, Clare? Is this okay?"

She looked straight into my eyes. "I've missed kissing you."

"Oh God, me too," I groaned. My fingers found her slim waist and pulled her to me once again. I grazed her pouting bottom lip with my teeth and she slipped her hands into the back pockets of my jeans, squeezing my ass in a way I was pretty sure she had never done before.

I decided to take a chance and moved my hands to her hips, putting just enough pressure on her that she started to step back toward my bed without removing her lips from mine. I was glad I had recreated the open pathway so she could move without hurting herself. The back of her legs hit my mattress and she giggled. "Anxious to get me in bed?"

I flinched unconsciously; it was a poor choice of words on her part. She must have noticed because she took my hand. "Because I am," she said emphatically. She jumped back onto the bed, tugging my hand with enough force that I flew right over her.

We landed in a tangle of limbs and I rolled off her and onto my back as we both burst out in hysterical laughter. "Smooth, Edwards," I said, reaching over to push the curls away from her eyes and behind her ear.

"Hey, it got you where I wanted you, didn't it?" She climbed on top of me, and I was grateful because I really wanted her to take the lead. Her position also had the added benefit that when she straddled my waist, her denim skirt rose up and revealed even more of the skin on her thighs.

But as much as I wanted to grope her legs, to caress her smooth skin as I moved my hand between them and slipped my fingers into her underwear, I knew we weren't there yet. So I kept my hands neutral, rubbing my dull fingernails against her back. There was some tension in my hands but it had nothing to do with nerves and everything to do with how desperately I wanted her.

I was starting to feel lightheaded. Our kisses hadn't slowed for a second and Clare was making these little sounds that just took my breath away. She wiggled down my body, and straddled my hips rather than my waist, pressing herself directly against my cock. My hips moved against her of their own accord and I moved my hand down and cupped her ass, pushing her into me even farther.

"Eli," she whispered, leaving kisses along my jawline before sucking my earlobe into her mouth. I whimpered as she nibbled on my collarbone, sucking in a deep breath when her hands moved to my chest and started unbuttoning my shirt. Her mouth followed, kissing every inch of newly exposed skin. The last button was directly over the waistband of my jeans, and she left another hickey right below my belly button.

Clare spread the fabric of my shirt and sat up, her hands tracing all over my chest. She was biting her lip, deep in thought. "I love…" she said so softly I barely heard her. I wondered if she was trying to tell me she still loved me when she said a little more strongly, "I love being with you like this."

It wasn't a grand declaration of feelings but it was good enough for me. I wrapped my arms around her waist and flipped her over, placing my body between her legs and letting my weight fall on her. I wanted to unbutton her shirt like she had done to me, and I was happy when she pushed my shirt down my arms and removed it entirely. But even with all of her aggressive moves, I couldn't keep my mind from holding back.

I had never fully lost myself in Clare's kisses, knowing that we would always stop before the natural endpoint that I desired so much. But since we made the leap to third base, I had let myself get pulled further and further under her spell, knowing that she was ready and willing to do most of the things I wanted. I had never gone down on her, but I knew that had been merely a matter of opportunity, not something that was off-limits.

But now that things were so complicated between us, the space between kissing and sex had turned into a chasm, and I was desperate to take the leap and terrified of either hurting her or falling in too deep.

I tested the waters, sliding both hands underneath her shirt. She didn't protest; she just kept kissing me. I slowly moved one hand over her stomach and onto the cup of her bra and she just arched into my touch. I traced the edge of the bra, startled to feel a line of lace at the top that I could not remember from any of Clare's previous undergarments.

I pulled back and gazed at her and she gave me a smirk that could rival one of my own. "Don't you want to see?"

I practically stopped breathing at Clare's uncommon flirtatiousness and tried to make my brain focus on something practical: like getting the buttons on her shirt undone in the shortest amount of time. Her cheeks were flushed and she turned her head away as I spread the fabric and got my first look at her body in over three months.

I was used to Clare's white, cotton bras – very utilitarian, very covering. They were built for support rather than sexiness but it didn't bother me since in the past, I had been allowed to take them off. This one was light blue, cut way lower than usual and covered with both a flowered pattern and a red lace border. It was very Clare and very sexy and I gazed at her nakedly.

"Wow," I said, unable to stop gawking at her curvy frame. She looked back at me and I tried to hold her gaze, but the sight of her breasts was just too tempting. "This is new."

She still looked embarrassed, but I could tell she was pleased. "I told you I went shopping with Alli."

I couldn't stop myself from reaching out to touch her, and she moaned softly at the feeling. "That girl is a good influence on you," I said, leaning over to kiss her neck, which in turned caused her to arch her breasts into my naked chest.

Clare's breathing was shallow and she stuttered out, "I think I'm going to have to wear the one piece tomorrow. I don't think you'll be able to control yourself when you see the other one."

"Good point," I said, trailing my tongue into her cleavage. "You'll have to save that for the next time we're alone." I hesitated for a second, hoping I wasn't pushing too hard. She didn't respond but her hands were digging into my back and I knew this wasn't a one time thing.

I thought occurred to me, and I had to know the answer. "Did you buy this thinking that I would get to see it?"

I didn't think it was possible for her flush to deepen but it did. "I didn't buy it for today necessarily, but the thought might have crossed my mind."

Oh God, she thought about taking her clothes off for me when I wasn't even there. I nuzzled one of her straps down her arm with my nose, and followed the line of the lace with my mouth, placing kisses over all of her exposed skin. She was mewling and sighing and I lowered the cup using my teeth, taking her nipple fully into my mouth. "Eli," she moaned and all of my resistance shattered.

I flipped us over and unhooked her bra, tugging her clothes from her body at record pace. Our hands were everywhere and everything was intense, and I was really starting to wonder where this was going. Her hips came down against me harshly and I pushed up to meet her.

My hands found the outside of her thighs and I pushed her skirt up a little, since it didn't have far to go. I could see that her underwear matched her bra and I slipped my hands underneath to cup her ass. She started thrusting against me in earnest, and I felt like I was going to bust out of my pants. She was groaning in my ear, enticing me with her little pants and sighs, and I decided to take a chance and stroke one finger between her legs through her underwear.

"Oh," she said, but it was a word and not a moan and I ripped my hand away immediately.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry," I said quickly.

"I just didn't realize," she said, between deep breaths. "That we were taking it that far."

"We don't have to. It's okay," I reassured her, feeling like the world's biggest asshole. "Let's just stop here. This has been great, but we can stop."

She sat up, leaning back so that she was straddling my legs. She wouldn't meet my eyes. "Do you want to keep going?"

Her hands moved to the button of my jeans and she was so close to touching me, and I felt like there was no good answer to that question. "Only if you do," I said finally, knowing I was a complete asshole for not just saying no.

She didn't respond but her fingers were still touching the button, as if she was trying to will herself to undo it. Clare had always been a little shy about getting physical, a little bit reserved. But this wasn't normal nervousness. The only time I had seen her look like this was the last time we were together. And the memory of her guilty blowjob and betrayal was not what _I_ wanted to be thinking about when we took that step together once again – not even if she was totally into this, which clearly she wasn't.

I removed her hand from the button. "We need to stop."

She moved off of me and we sat down next to each other on the bed. She seemed embarrassed and immediately crossed her arms over her chest. "Can you pass me my shirt?" she asked.

We redressed awkwardly. It was like the sexy moments had all evaporated and now we were left with nothing but our unclear feelings for each other.

"Are you okay?" I finally asked, daring to touch her cheek.

She closed her eyes. "Yes. I just…" She leaned closer, resting her head on my shoulder as my arms wrapped around her waist. I held her in my arms for a few minutes, waiting for her to finish her sentence, but she never did.

"It's getting late," she finally said.

I nodded. "Let me get Cece."

We drove to her house in silence. Cece must have sensed the shift in attitude between us, because she refrained from pestering us asking for details of our trip tomorrow or giving us a synopsis of the True Blood episode they had just watched.

I didn't want to leave things so unsettled, especially since tomorrow we'd be spending the whole day together and we'd be with Sav and Alli and therefore, couldn't actually work things out. So when we pulled up at the house, I jumped out of the car and walked Clare to her door.

"I just want you to know that what happened between us tonight…it meant something to me. It wasn't just about sex or being horny or missing you, and I'm sorry if I took it too far. We can slow things down if you want and take all the time in the world, but I'd really, really like to keep kissing you and taking you out on special dates and I'd really like to walk on the beach holding your hand tomorrow," I said, my stomach lurching as I realized just how much I was revealing to her.

Her smile was lit by the soft porch light. "I want all of those things too," she said. "I'm just not quite ready to go back to the way thing were before. I need a little more time."

"I can give you that," I promised, though really I was wondering just how much more time she needed.

She leaned in and pressed a kiss to the corner of my mouth. "This means a lot to me too. I want to make sure you know that."

She reached for the doorknob but I wasn't quite ready to say goodnight to her. "Is there anything else I can do? To make things better between us."

Her face softened. "Just keep doing what you're doing. You've done everything right, Eli. I'm proud of you and happy for us that we've made it this far." She squeezed my hand. "Just a little more time. That's all I need."

I pretended to look at my watch. "Well that's good because in about 10 hours, we'll be picking you up for the beach trip."

She smiled. "See you tomorrow, Eli."

"Goodnight, Clare."


	8. Let Go

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Degrassi or anything else.**

**Twitter: themusiksnob / Tumblr: musiksnob**

**Thank you for your continued support. You all really mean the world to me.**

Chapter 8

I had set aside the afternoon to work on my room, so I was sitting on the floor, next to a tub labeled Julia, trying to see if there was anything that I wanted to save that reminded me of her lying on the floor in the nearby vicinity. I had hoped that Clare would be able to join me because her encouragement always meant I was more successful in my room, but she had a doctor's appointment to go to.

I was trying to decide whether an old shirt that Julia had once told me was hideous fit the criteria for the Julia box when Cece knocked on my open door.

"Your aunt just called and told me she sent me an email yesterday but my computer is broken again. Can I read it on yours?" Cece asked.

I rolled my eyes. Between Bullfrog's porn collection and Cece's habit of clicking on every link sent to her through email whether she knew the person or not, their computer was loaded with more viruses and spyware than anything else. "Fine," I said. "Just don't click on anything else."

She sat down on my bed and opened up the laptop. "There's a Word document open. It's asking if I want to save it?"

"Just minimize it," I said. I hoped she hadn't seen too much of it. I had gotten into the habit of writing myself letters when I was in rehab. Dr. Martin had recommended journaling, but I wasn't a big chronicle your life kind of guy. I had written a few letters to my parents and to Clare and to Adam and even one to Julia's stepfather when I was in rehab, but now that I was home, I really only wrote them to myself.

I tried to be positive in the letters and focus on what was going right and encouraging myself to keep up the good work, but occasionally, they were filled with the dark, emo thoughts that most people would expect from me. I kept those on my computer but I printed out the better ones and tucked them into my locked box in case a day came when I needed some reassurance that I was doing okay without abusing the meds.

"Aunt Linda sends her love," Cece said. "I think she's going to bring the boys down for Labour Day weekend. We haven't seen them in a while."

"Great," I muttered. My cousins were like a foot taller than me and weighed practically double my weight and their idea of a good time was playing football and beating me up. Maybe I could find an excuse to get out of it if Adam or Clare wanted to make other plans.

Cece typed a quick response while I put a few more items in the Julia box. The week before I had found a small photo album wedged between my dresser and the wall that she must have brought over when she was living with us. It had baby pictures of her, all the way up through the end of Grade Eight. The last picture was of the two of us at Cotillion, matching in my black suit and her black cocktail dress. We had gone as friends but after she dragged me onto the dance floor and I gazed into her eyes as I nervously clung to her waist, I realized just how much I'd been wanting to kiss her – and finally got up the nerve to do it. I kept pulling the album out of the box and looking through the pictures, loving her giggly baby smile and her eye rolling preteen photos just as much as the ones of the two of us.

Cece must have closed the browser because she turned the screen so I could the photo wallpaper on my desktop. "That's a great picture," she said. After our beach trip on Saturday, Clare had sent me a picture of her, Sav, Alli and me that she had gotten a random girl to take. It was a great picture of us, and I liked seeing my arm around Clare's shoulders and the grin on her face just as much as I enjoyed how it captured the low neckline of her otherwise conservative swimsuit and therefore, her gigantic and beautiful tits. Alli was on the other side of her in a tiny bikini, but I never found my eyes straying over to check her out.

"Did you have fun at the beach?"

"Yeah, it was nice," I said. "Alli's kind of irritating most of the time, but she's better when she's around her brother than the girls at school, and Sav's awesome. I wish he wasn't going to college so far away. I feel like we could have been pretty good friends."

"Well, that's nice," she said. "But that wasn't exactly what I was asking."

Cece always got straight to the point. "Clare and I are doing really, really well."

I was actually surprised that Clare and I were on such good terms after what had happened on our last date night, right before the beach trip. I was really nervous things would be awkward after we had taken things too far physically the night before. In fact, I was so anxious over that moment that before I left, Cece had slipped me one of my pills in a little plastic travel case in case I needed it. I asked her if she wanted me to give it to Clare to monitor, but she told me it was just one pill and she trusted me.

My hands were shaking as I tucked the pill into my backpack, but when Sav came to pick me up, Alli darted out of the front seat and moved next to Clare. "He wants you to control the Ipod," Alli grumbled.

I shot Clare a soft smile as I sat down, and Clare called out, "Wait!"

She darted out of the SUV and came around to open my door. I had no idea what she was doing, and figured maybe she wanted to control the music, but before I could unbuckle the belt and offer her my seat, she put both hands on my face and pulled me in for a kiss.

It didn't last long, a few seconds, with just a hint of tongue. But Clare pulled back blushing and smiled. "I didn't want to wait two hours for that," she said sweetly. She went back to her seat while Alli "awww"ed and Sav grumbled about PDA rules being the only good thing about Degrassi his Grade Twelve year.

The rest of the day was perfect. Sav rented a jet ski while Clare and I splashed each other while jumping over the small waves. Alli complained about seaweed and getting her hair wet before Clare finally dunked her and she joined us in our water fight. Sav and I talked about his university plans and a few new bands we were into, while Alli soaked up the sun and Clare huddled under an umbrella, reading some book by Sarah Dessen she had been raving about.

We changed clothes and tried to make ourselves look presentable before going to dinner at a restaurant that was a little nicer than the places we usually went to. Clare looked incredible in a white sundress and I kept inching my chair a little bit closer to her until she tangled her fingers in mine, letting them rest against her knee.

Alli called shotgun on the way home, and Clare sat in the middle seat so that she could rest her head on my shoulder and take a little nap. I was tired too, but I stayed awake so I could savor the feeling of her next to me.

When they dropped me off, I initiated our goodnight kiss before I ran up the stairs, feeling truly happy for the first time in a while. I ran into Bullfrog in the TV room and remembered the pill Cece had given me. "Here," I said, handing him the container. "I didn't need this."

His look of pride was the perfect way to cap off that day.

"I'm glad you had a good time," Cece said. "And I'm really glad about you and Clare." She closed the laptop and looked at me seriously. "I was so worried you wouldn't be able to work things out with her after the accident. She had been so good for you."

"Unlike me for her?" I asked dryly.

"Eli, no," Cece said. "Just that it was a lot for a sixteen year old girl to go through. And being there for you, supporting you in the way you needed, takes a strength of character most girls Clare's age just don't have."

I shrugged. I knew Cece was right, but I didn't feel like dwelling on how messed up I had made things. She seemed to take the hint and changed the subject. "I can't believe how much you've done in here. It looks like you've thrown out quite a bit recently."

I laughed. "Sort of." I explained to her Dr. Loughner's sorting technique: to take all the items that had sentimental value of any degree and place them in themed tubs. Most of the tubs had Julia's name on them, but there was one for Clare and one for Adam, and even one for my parents.

I was skeptical, but the piles on my floor had slowly shrunken, since it was either for me to move something (as long as I did the moving) than to throw out something. He tried to appeal to the OCD in me but explaining this was an even more ordered way of structuring my stuff, and that did help, but mostly I was just glad I could make visible progress without getting rid of too much stuff. Dr. Loughner tried to convince me that whatever I couldn't fit into one of my categories probably needed to be thrown out, but I knew I was a few months away from facing that with all of the stuff that still remained.

Cece got off the bed and started looking through the Julia box I was working on. She pulled out a small stuffed frog Julia had won after kicking my ass at darts and gave it that pouty face women make before they are about to cry. She put it back in the box and sat down on the floor next to me. "What's your favorite thing? That you've found."

I smirked. I dug toward the bottom of the box and pulled out the playbill from _The Sound of Music_. Cece took it from me and laughed. "Oh, Eli." She couldn't stop laughing. "I just remember you working all those weekends for your dad to save up enough money to take Julia to _We Will Rock You_ for her birthday and by the time you had enough, it was sold out."

"And she said, 'That's okay, Eli. We can go to _The Sound of Music_ instead.'" I said, doing a fairly good impression of Julia's voice. "Worst day of my life."

Cece shook her head. "Showtunes. Of all the things… I know me and Bullfrog don't give you kids very much to rebel against, but showtunes?"

Julia and I had very similar music taste: alternative, classic rock, punk, screamo, anything with kickass guitars. But for some reason, she was obsessed with musical theatre. I thought it was because she liked singing so much; I could carry a tune pretty well, but Julia could belt out a song like she was onstage in any location.

"And she had a song for every freaking emotion. If I heard her sing that song from Dreamgirls one more time, I would have lost my mind."

Cece started laughing so hard that tears were pouring out of her eyes and she grabbed onto the bottom of my jeans. "Do you remember the first time Bullfrog and I heard her sing?" I shook my head, trying to remember.

"It was the very first night you snuck in her for a sleepover," she said, and it started to dawn on me what she was talking about. "And she got up at 6 in the morning and got into the shower and started singing songs from _A Chorus Line_ at the top of her lungs."

"So much for sneaking around," I said sheepishly.

Cece rolled her eyes. "We didn't care about the sneaking. We would have been fine with it if you'd told us. We just didn't appreciate being woken up at the crack of dawn by our son's girlfriend singing _Tits and Ass_ in our shower." Cece shook her head. "It was Bullfrog's day off too."

"Sorry," I said. "I didn't know she was going to do that. I thought we were trying to be discrete."

"Please, we'd figured it out the night before when we heard all the moaning coming from your bedroom. Some of it was more high-pitched than usual, so it was pretty obvious."

Ugh. Usually Cece didn't tease me quite as much as Bullfrog did. "If you heard her moaning, why did Bullfrog give me the sex talk after she went home? I could have lived without hearing that for the rest of my life." Bullfrog's sex talk had little to do with STDs and unplanned pregnancy – they'd bought me a giant box of condoms the day I told them she was my girlfriend, even though I was in Grade Eight – and everything to do with how to please a lady, complete with full color print outs from the internet that explained the location of the clitoris in much more detail than my school's health textbooks.

"It's important to be prepared, Eli," Cece said seriously. "What if she'd been faking? It didn't seem that way, but you don't want to be _that guy_."

"We need thicker walls," I groaned.

"I don't think any walls could have blocked out Julia in the shower. Whatever possessed her to shower so early in the morning?"

I thought back to the time after she'd moved in. "She didn't sleep much. She had insomnia. She's try to keep me up all night but she was always awake before me in the morning. I was glad when she started taking showers at night though. I loved her voice, but Sondheim before coffee is just torture."

Cece smiled wryly. "And there was that time I got home from work early to find a duet coming out of my upstairs shower."

I blushed. I wasn't sure how Cece and Bullfrog always managed to witness the most embarrassing moments of my life and bring them up relentlessly. "At least that was Dead Hand."

"Should have gone with Prince," Cece said dreamily.

"Ew, Mom, I don't want to know."

Cece ignored me and grabbed the photo album out of the box and started looking through Julia's pictures. "Awww, this is adorable," she said, holding up a photo of Julia dressed as Courtney Love for Halloween. "How old do you think she was there?"

"Nine or ten, maybe?" I guessed.

Cece smiled as she came to the picture of us at the dance. "You know, I miss her too."

"I know, Mom," I said a little shortly, not really wanting to get too emotional over this.

"No, I mean. I miss her. She and I got pretty close while she was staying here. I can't tell you how many nights she came downstairs after you fell asleep when I was changing shifts and couldn't get to sleep at night. We would make a pot of herbal tea and sit at the kitchen table and just talk about everything. That was the last time I felt like I really knew what was going on in your life, because Julia was always bragging about your writing or things you said in class. And she was such a good listener. If I was fighting with your dad, I go to her for advice before I'd go to Aunt Linda."

Cece smiled wistfully. "She was more than your girlfriend to me or even a surrogate daughter. I thought of her as a friend."

"I know she loved you. Both of you."

She leaned over to ruffle my hair. "And you too, kiddo. I didn't think it was possible for kids who were so young to be so in love but you two proved me wrong." Bullfrog wasn't home but for some reason, Cece lowered her voice anyway. "You know, she came down in the middle of the night after the first time you guys slept together. I've never seen her look so happy."

I cringed. Not only was it a little weird that she talked to my mother about sleeping me with me, but our first time was super awkward. Romantic and nice but really, really awkward.

"Besides that," Cece teased. "What's your favorite Julia memory? Don't think about it. The first one that comes to your mind."

I grinned. "Remember the time we went to the rock festival Dad's station was hosting? And Julia kept going on and on about how much she wanted to see The Flaming Lips. And then we get there and she gets really excited and it was Modest Mouse playing, and she couldn't even tell the difference."

Cece had started laughing even before I finished my story. "And she was so mad at you for pointing it out. She hated being wrong about anything but especially music."

"And they don't even sound a thing alike."

"You shouldn't have spoiled it," Cece joked. "She would have figured it out when they started playing Yoshimi three hours later."

I could still picture Julia's face: half angry, half embarrassed. "I had to give her the tickets to _The Sound of Music_ when we got home to get her to speak to me again."

"You did spend the whole day laughing at the poor girl."

I couldn't stop the laughter even three years later. "I just don't understand how you could make that mistake." I had to wipe some tears from my eyes, but for the first time in a while, they were tears of happiness.

Cece looked at me tenderly. "When was the last time you thought of that day?"

I shrugged. "Before she died." This was the first time I had thought about Julia for more than a minute without getting really upset. It was nice to think about her and the good times we'd spent together.

She put that Mom look on her face again. "You know if you let go of some of the pain and the guilt, it wouldn't be so hard to remember the good times."

I knew she was right, but it was still so hard. "It would probably help me get rid of more stuff too."

"You're right about that." She glanced around the room and found the box with her and Bullfrog's name on it. "I've got to see this."

There wasn't as much stuff in there as the Julia boxes, but I'd unearthed some baby pictures and old records I'd "borrowed" from them. She looked at a photo of me in my soccer uniform in second grade, the last year I'd agreed to participate in organized sports.

"So cute," she cooed.

I turned back to the pile I had been looking through, much less enthused about reminiscing my own childhood than I had my past with Julia, when I heard Cece say. "I'm still mad at those movers."

"Huh?" I had no clue what she was talking about.

"They lost that big box of pictures I had when we moved here," she explained. "I've got baby pictures and you've got every memory from Grade Eight until now, but I lost all those pictures from what? Grade Four to Grade Seven?" She frowned, pawing through the box. "You didn't want to bring any of your toys with you, either. So there's really nothing from that time period."

I took a deep breath, making sure to face away from Cece because I knew she could read me like a book. "Well, I wasn't a kid anymore, Mom."

But I knew it was more than that. I'd been to enough therapy sessions to know that when we moved, I used it as an opportunity to bury the past, and Mike's abuse. It had been easy enough to convince her to donate my old toys – I was too old for them at that point – but I was the one who took the box of photos to the park and burned them, never wanting to see the clothes I'd worn when Mike hurt me or the pain lurking behind my eyes even in the happiest photos.

I didn't want to turn around but I knew I must look silly starting into the corner. I glanced at Cece and saw the look of sadness on her face for missing pieces of my past.

Maybe Clare was right. Maybe I did need to tell my parents about Mike.

I didn't feel ready, but I hadn't felt ready to tell Clare either. And she'd been nothing but supportive of me ever since.

Maybe I could tell the story one final time.

"You know, Dr. Loughner's been pushing me to have another family therapy session," I said, testing the waters. "I think he might actually have a few good things to say about me this time."

Cece smiled. "You've been doing so well. I'm happy to tell him all about it." She put the cover back on the box and walked toward the doors. "Maybe next week? I'm off next Thursday and I don't think Bullfrog has any appointments after his show that day."

One more week. I could get ready to do this in one week. Maybe.

Maybe if Clare came with us. I thought I could do it if I had her strength beside me.

"Hey Mom," I said and she paused at the door. "We might not be done with the showtunes. I've definitely heard Clare humming _No Good Deed_ from _Wicked_ under her breath."

"Kids today," she grumbled, but then she smiled. "I think we can keep her around anyway."


	9. Pity and Fear

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Degrassi or anything else.**

**Twitter: themusiksnob / Tumblr: musiksnob**

*****WARNING: This is a sad, tough chapter. In it, Eli explains to his parents what exactly Mike did to him when he was nine years old. It may be potential triggering to people who have suffered abuse in the past.*****

**I'm sorry for the sadness, but this was necessary to the story. There are three more chapters after this one, and the first two are VERY happy, and the third isn't really happy or sad, just a fitting ending to the story.**

**Thank you for reading this story.**

* * *

><p>Chapter 9<p>

I could hear Cece and Bullfrog in the kitchen, finishing up their lunch. They were blaring a Depeche Mode CD and I could hear them sing along with each chorus. I had tried to join them earlier, but I was too anxious about our appointment later that afternoon so I just grabbed a sandwich and hid upstairs in my room. My plate lay untouched next to my computer. I knew if I ate, I would puke.

I waited as long as I could before heading downstairs. "We should probably get going," I said, trying to keep my voice calm. "We need to pick Clare up on the way over."

Cece and Bullfrog exchanged a look. "Clare's coming?" Cece asked in confusion. "Did Dr. Loughner want her there for some reason?"

"I want her there," I said. It hadn't been the original plan but when she called me last night to check in and found me freaking out, she had made the offer to come along for moral support. I had a feeling that without her there to encourage me I would find some excuse not to tell them.

I could see both of my parents analyzing my statement in their heads but fortunately, neither of them questioned me. "Let me just get my purse," Cece said. "We can leave in just a second."

The ride over was tense. Bullfrog didn't even tap out the beat to the songs on the radio on the steering wheel and Cece was staring out the window. Happy Together came on the radio, which was practically a Goldsworthy singalong staple and not one of us opened our mouths to join in. When we got to Clare's house, she gave us a warm hello as she hopped into the car, but all I could manage was a tense nod. She seemed to understand the mood and joined us in our silent meditations.

When we arrived at Dr. Loughner's office, the receptionist waved us right in. Cece and Bullfrog disappeared through the door; they had been here a few times with me though those meetings focused more on practical matters like medicine and dosing and coping with panic attacks rather than recounting traumatic events that I would rather never think of again. Clare was right on their heels but I grabbed her by her arm and she let the door close in front of her.

"I can't do this," I rasped, unable to use my full voice.

She took both of my hands in hers and looked straight at me. "Yes, you can. I believe in you, Eli."

"I can't," I whispered. My whole body was shaking.

She threw her arms around my shoulders and pulled me into a hug. "You told me months ago," she reminded me, her voice soothing against my ear. "And I'm still here, Eli. I'm still here."

She pressed a kiss into my temple and tightened her hold on me. "They are your parents and they love you. Nothing is going to change that, I promise you."

I could feel my heartbeat slowing as Clare held me. She didn't push me in any way; she just held me until I was more focused on the scent of her shampoo than my impending doom. I knew we couldn't wait out here all day and finally pulled back, making sure to keep holding her hand.

We walked into the room and I was happy to see that Bullfrog had taken a seat in a chair, leaving room for both Clare and me on the couch with Cece. I sat between them, holding Clare's hand with so much force I was worried I was hurting her.

I was about to introduce Clare to Dr. Loughner when Cece broke in. "How could you be so stupid?"

I looked up at Dr. Loughner alarmed. Did he tell my parents while I was in the waiting room with Clare? But he looked just as confused as I did.

Bullfrog leaned forward in his chair, rubbing his hands together. "You lied to me, Eli."

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"You told me you weren't sleeping with Clare," Bullfrog said.

Cece jumped right in. "We bought you all those condoms. The only reason we supported you having sex at your age is because we thought we could trust you to be responsible…"

Clare's face was practically purple and I burst out into laughter. "No…no…you guys have it all wrong. Clare isn't pregnant."

They looked to Clare for confirmation. "That's not even…possible," she said awkwardly, squeezing my hand for support.

"Oh, thank God," Cece said, and they both looked visibly relieved. "I just couldn't figure out why we would all be here if it wasn't something completely awful."

Her words pretty much killed the brief moment of levity. Dr. Loughner looked to me for an explanation but I was silent so he jumped in. "Well, the reason for today's meeting is twofold. I'd like to bring you up to date on Eli's progress, but I know Eli has something he'd like to share with you."

They looked at me expectantly, and my mouth dropped open. _This_ was how we were going to do this? There wasn't any preamble? I was just supposed to lead with, "By the way, the asshole kid next door sexually assaulted me on more than one occasion but don't worry, it was eight years ago and I never bothered to tell you"?

Dr. Loughner cleared his throat. "I think one of the main issues we've been dealing with is the cause of Eli's anxiety, because unlike many of my patients, his abuse of his medication has much more to do with his mental health than a physical addiction. Eli and I have talked at length about how traumatic events in this past have remained sources of anxiety for him in the present. Julia's death, obviously, has had a huge impact, and I think Eli has been doing a pretty good job of coping with that overall, particularly as he has made some progress with his hoarding compulsion."

He paused and glanced at Clare. "The fact that he has allowed himself to engage in other healthy romantic relationships is also a positive sign." I could feel Clare blushing, and I squeezed her hand, then kept holding it but with less pressure than before.

"I think for me," he continued, "the issue that I didn't quite understand at first was Eli's fear of Mark Fitzgerald. While the stabbing incident at Vegas Night was severe, it didn't seem to affect his behavior right away. When I first started seeing Eli to discuss the hoarding, he didn't even bring it up to me. It was only when Fitz returned that his anxiety became uncontrollable by regular methods."

"But that's normal, right?" Cece asked. "I've read up on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and it doesn't always manifest itself right away."

Dr. Loughner nodded. "You're absolutely right. And I'm not surprised that Eli had a reaction to Fitz's return. But I'd always been a little confused by how that tension hadn't abated at all. Even when Fitz apologized and went out of his way to avoid both Eli and Clare for more than a month, Eli's anxiety only grew."

I glanced at Cece and she was narrowing her eyes in confusion. "Then what caused it?" she asked, looking at me with so much concern that I had to look away.

Dr. Loughner nodded to me and I knew I couldn't put this off much longer. "I kept thinking that Fitz was going to come after Clare."

"Why did you think that, honey? Did he do anything to threaten you, Clare?" Cece asked.

Clare shook her head but she let me answer. "He blackmailed her into going to Vegas Night with him and when I confronted him, he told me that when he had sex with her, he'd be gentle." There was a tremor in my voice that I couldn't control. "I knew she had a purity ring, that even if she liked him, she wouldn't have sex with him. I was scared that he would hurt her when she refused him."

Cece looked alarmed. "But he never…?"

I covered my face with my hands, unable to get the image out of my head. Clare placed her hand on my back to comfort me and said, "No. The few times we were alone together he was very kind to me. He just said that to get under Eli's skin."

Cece kept looking between me and Dr. Loughner, trying to figure out what I wasn't saying. "That's exactly what that sounds like, an empty threat meant to rile you up. And when he came back, he left both of you alone. Why did you think he was still a threat to Clare?"

"Because in my experience, bullies don't stop until they've taken everything from you."

"Eli?" she asked softly. I couldn't look her in the eyes but I could hear the tears in her voice and I knew I couldn't put this off any longer.

I kept telling myself: _This is the last time you'll have to tell this story. Just one last time and you'll never have to say these words again_.

I focused on a point on the floor across the room, not letting my eyes stray for a moment. And I told them. I told them about Mike and how he'd push me around in the backyard. How he terrorized me whenever they had they backs turned and how he pretended to be a big brother to me in front of them. How I tried to escape his violence by taking the long way home through the woods and how he punished me more when he found out.

I had to take a few breaks. To stop and keep myself under control. I tried to focus on the spot on the floor and the feeling of Clare's hand squeezing mine.

When I got to the point in the story when Cece left me alone with him in the house while she went to the hospital after Bullfrog's car accident, I couldn't actually say the word 'rape' but they could hear it in my voice, no matter how monotone I tried to make my recollection. Cece was shaking next to me but I couldn't look at her or Bullfrog. I couldn't see the disappointment in their eyes.

I didn't leave anything out this time, never wanting to have to talk about this again. I told them that it happened two more times after that and how he told me he'd kill me if I ever told. How he showed me a knife with what looked like blood on it and said I wouldn't be the first.

I don't know what I was expecting to feel as I told them. It was different with Clare – painful, of course, but she didn't know me then. My parents not only knew me but they were responsible for me. And they never even knew. I felt this emptiness as I reminded them of things they must have noticed: how I spend the rest of Grade 4 and 5 staying after school as late as I could until one of them picked me up, and spent the rest of my free time locked up in my room. How I barely felt like I could breathe until Grade Six, when switching schools kept me out of my neighborhood most of the time, and I didn't feel like I was living until the summer before Grade Seven when we finally moved to our house in Toronto and left Mike far behind.

I finished the story and glanced at Dr. Loughner. He nodded at me in approval. "So, I guess that's why Fitz freaked me out so much. Because in my experience, bullies don't stop when you tell them to. Because…" I turned to look at Clare for the first time and saw her tear streaked face. "Because I love Clare so much," I said, using the present tense for the first time that summer, "and I knew just how much it hurt to have something like that taken from you. Because I would do anything to prevent her from having to suffer that kind of pain."

Clare pulled me into a hug and she whispered something that I was pretty sure was "I love you" but I couldn't quite hear and wasn't really in the right place to question it. She let me go after a few moments but grabbed my hand again. I felt like her touch was the only thing keeping me grounded right now.

The room was silent and tense. I expected Dr. Loughner to jump in with some psychobabble about transference or PTSD or sexual abuse but he waited patiently for someone to have a response.

Bullfrog seemed take his cue from me because he was staring into the corner of the room. He didn't look sad or angry, just shocked.

Cece on the other hand was a blubbering mess. "Why didn't you tell us?" Cece said. "How could we not have known?"

I could feel the tears slipping out of my eyes for the first time. "I was so afraid of disappointing you."

"Oh, Eli," she said, pulling me into a fierce hug. "You could never. You could never." She held me as we both cried, sobbing uncontrollably until the tears ran out. I could feel Clare's hand on my hip, letting me know she was still there, but she gave me the time to allow my mom comfort me in a way I hadn't realized I needed after all these years.

When we pulled back finally, Dr. Loughner stood in front of us holding a box of tissues. Cece grabbed a few but I just wiped my face with the back of my hand. "Cece, how are you feeling?" he asked gently.

"Overwhelmed," she said. "I'm just so angry that this happened and mad at myself that I didn't realize it. And hurt that you didn't tell me. And fucking pissed off that I couldn't have done something to stop this."

"Mom," I said softly, hating that she was blaming herself. This was exactly the reason that I didn't want to tell them.

Her voice raised in anger. "I should have known. I mean, I knew something was wrong but we just thought he was in one of those phases where you hate your parents and want to be alone. He was always such a precocious kid; we thought he was just becoming a teenager a few years early."

Dr. Loughner tried to soothe her. "Cece, the problem is that there are signs that things are wrong, but they look a lot like the signs that all kids that age exhibit. Most parents don't know until their child tells them."

"I should have known though," she said firmly. "We've always been close, all three of us. We had family meetings and we talked about money and sex openly. I thought there wasn't anything Eli felt he had to hide from us." Her hands were shaking. "I should have seen bruises. I should have put a stop to it before it ever got that far."

"He only hit me in places you wouldn't see. He was a psychopath," I explained. "He knew exactly what he was doing and how he could get away with it. And I was too scared to stop him."

"I'm a terrible mother," Cece sobbed, and I put my arm around her.

"No, you're not. You're a great mother," I tried to reassure her.

Cece took a few moments to get her sobs under control. "What made you tell us now?" she finally asked.

I looked at Clare and she nodded, giving me permission to tell her sister's story. "Clare's sister was raped, and she didn't tell anyone. And she started acting really out of character and making bad decisions and their parents didn't know why she was acting that way. I thought I wouldn't ever need to tell you since it was so long ago, but obviously it's still affecting me, and Clare convinced me that we'd all be better off if you understood where I was coming from."

Dr. Loughner narrowed his eyes at me. I could tell he was annoyed that I kept leaving out parts of my story when I talked to him. "I'm sorry to hear about your sister, Clare."

Clare nodded. "She's doing a lot better now. She's doing missionary work in Kenya and I think she's finally started to deal with what happened to her. But we should be focused on Eli right now."

Cece's gasp pierced the silence that followed Clare's statement and she grabbed my arm with her talon-like fingernails. "What if he gave you something? You could have AIDS and we wouldn't even know it."

I really didn't want to think about that. "I'm okay, Mom. I got tested." I glanced at Clare out of the corner of my eye. "Before Julia."

It wasn't something I had thought of at the time, but I had health first semester in Grade Nine, and they kept hammering home the facts about STDs and using condoms _every_ time, even in homosexual encounters. My teacher made such a big deal over it that it finally hit me that could include nonconsensual sex and that if I wasn't sure I was okay, I could end up putting Julia at risk if she ever agreed to sleep with me. I lied and told the doctor that I had unprotected sex with my girlfriend because there was no way I was telling him the truth, but fortunately, all of the tests came back negative.

I thought Cece would be relieved but her face crumbled. "I just keep thinking: how could someone do this to my baby boy?" I reached for her hand, trying to keep myself from crying even more.

She cried for another minute and we waited, silently for her to finish her thought. "I need a cigarette," she finally said in exasperation.

I wanted to tell her that if I could make it through this conversation without an anxiety pill, she could surely handle it without a cigarette considering she'd quit 17 years ago and only smoked when she was really stressed out. But my hands were still shaky even though Clare and Cece were holding them and I wasn't quite sure I'd be able to hold onto my part of the bargain.

Dr. Loughner said, "I think the question now that we understand the roots of Eli's issues is, where do we go from here? I think our counseling sessions have been fairly productive for him, and I've been pleased with your reports of his responsible and decreased medication usage." He glanced at Bullfrog who was still staring into space with an impassive look on his face. "I know this is a lot to cope with and if either of you would like to set up a personal appointment, I think it might be helpful for you."

Cece nodded quickly. "Is there something else we can do? I mean, what's the statute of limitations on this? He should pay for what he did to my son."

Dr. Loughner opened his mouth to respond but I cut him off. "He's dead."

Clare gasped and even Bullfrog turned to look at me. I hadn't told Clare or my therapists that fact. "After Vegas Night, after Fitz, when I was grounded and Clare was away at her grandmother's…it was on my mind a lot, for the first time in a few years. I…I googled him. Found an obituary." I shrugged. "Drunk driving accident. Two years ago." There was an article that told me he was the drunk driver. The woman in the other car had been injured but there were no other fatalities.

"At least he won't be able to hurt anyone else," Cece murmured.

"Well, I think that's something we'll need to discuss at our next session, Eli," Dr. Loughner said. "Is there anything else you'd like your parents to know?"

I took a deep breath. "I just…I don't want this to change anything. I don't want this to loom over our heads for the rest of our lives. I don't want this to define our relationship. I want to go home and I want to put this behind us. I don't want you to treat me any differently."

"We won't," Bullfrog said gruffly, speaking for the first time. I met his gaze. "We won't," he repeated seriously. I wondered if he was thinking of his own relationship with his father. I had gotten the idea that his father had hit him when he was too young to fight back and that he probably sympathized with me more than Cece or Clare ever could. It was good to know that he understood why it was so important for things to go back to normal.

Dr. Loughner wrapped up the session. I listened, but I was kind of in a haze. Cece and Bullfrog filed out of the room to make another appointment with the receptionist but I went outside, craving some fresh air.

Clare followed me downstairs. When we got to the car, I looked at her, meeting her gaze for the first time since I told her I love her.

"How are you feeling?" she asked softly, and I shrugged.

She walked closer to me and placed her hand on my heart. "Well, I'm feeling so proud of you." Her hand moved up my chest and then she wrapped her arms around my neck. I placed my hands on her waist, enjoying Clare's embrace. She was obviously trying to comfort me, but there was something more behind it. It wasn't like she was going to jump me or anything, but this was a hug that went beyond friendship.

It felt romantic.

We didn't break apart until my parents came out of the building and Cece shot me a curious look, so clearly the spark between us wasn't so hidden.

The ride home was quiet again, understandably, but at least for me, I felt like a weight was off my shoulders.

Bullfrog pulled up to a red light and cleared his throat awkwardly. I met his eyes in the rearview mirror. "So this…hasn't had any negative effect on your sex life, has it?"

"Bullfrog!" Cece admonished, but I couldn't help but laugh. It was such a Bullfrog thing, to only be able to discuss such a serious topic in terms of something he was comfortable with: sex.

"No, Dad," I said, rolling my eyes.

"Clare?" he asked for confirmation, and I grinned at her fiery cheeks.

I wasn't expecting her to respond, but she surprised me. "No complaints."

Wow. She was giving me a shy but happy look and I couldn't help but lean over to whisper in her ear, softly enough that my parents wouldn't be able to hear. "You have no idea how happy that makes me."

Her only response was to give me a quick kiss on the lips.

She always knew how to make me feel better.


	10. Mmmbop

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Degrassi or anything else.**

**Twitter: themusiksnob / Tumblr: musiksnob**

**Two more chapters after this one. Enjoy! Much thanks for all the support.**

* * *

><p>Chapter 10<p>

In the two weeks since the therapy session, things had been a little awkward with me and my parents, though they were trying their best to not act differently. They both seemed to want to spend a lot of extra time with me though, so I'd spent most of my free nights watching movies with them. I liked the movies because it meant they felt like they were spending time with me but that I didn't really have to talk to them.

They both had to work all day and they'd left me alone, so I invited Adam over. He and I hadn't spent as much time together this summer as I would have liked, because his mom had gotten him a job doing boring filing and data entry work at her office, but we'd tried to have a guys night at least once a week. He'd stopped working this last week before school so he'd get to have a little bit of a summer vacation.

We'd spent the entire afternoon on our laptops in the TV room, playing Portal 2 together. It was fun while it lasted, but we'd beaten the game, and we couldn't come up with anything else to do.

"We could go to the mall," I suggested, even though I wasn't really that big of a shopping fan.

"It's too hot to go outside," Adam complained. "We could watch Clown Academy 6. It's on Netflix streaming."

"No thank you," I said.

My phone buzzed and I read a text from Brian. _Finally out of prison. Wanna smoke a blunt?_ I laughed. "We could get high with my old roommate. He finally got out of rehab."

"You're joking, right?" Adam asked.

"Seriously?" I threw a pillow at him, then typed a quick response to Brian, declining his offer.

"Okay, okay, sorry," he said. "Guess he didn't really learn anything while he was there."

"He was in for four months too." I shook my head. I was pretty sure the drugs weren't really his problem, but I wasn't so sure he'd figured out what it was.

"Four months? Shit, that's like forever. I thought you said your six weeks was a long stay."

I shrugged. "He has rich parents who don't pay attention to him. Easier to keep him locked up, I guess."

Adam's phone rang. "We're awfully popular today," he joked. He glanced at the caller ID. "It's Clare," he said, wiggling his eyebrows at me. "What's up, Clare?" He kept smirking at me as he listened to her talk. He laughed into the phone, "Everybody wants a piece of me today. I'm with your _boyfriend_." I shot Adam a dirty look but he was listening to Clare with a smile on his face.

He covered the mouthpiece though his voice was loud enough that there was no way Clare couldn't hear him. "Is it okay if I invite her over?"

"Of course, you idiot."

"Yeah, you can come. But we're bored, so you need to come up with something for us to do…Surprise us," he said. "See you in a few."

Adam hung up and grinned at me. "I guess you told Clare we were hanging out today?"

I shook my head. "Nah, I didn't get to talk to her last night. She was out with her mom so I just texted her to say goodnight."

Adam looked pleased. He and I had always been closer than he and Clare were but I knew he appreciated when she spent time with just him, even though he'd complained jokingly that even when I'm not there, she never shuts up about me. "Well, I'm sure she'll be happy to see both of us then."

I was really happy Clare was coming over. She'd been on my mind pretty much constantly. We were going back to school next week and I wanted to make sure that everything was settled between us. I knew the school year would be stressful for me, particularly since I'd almost certainly see Fitz and I just wanted to make sure that Clare and I were in the right place.

"Can I ask your advice on something?" I asked, distracting Adam from checking his Facerange page.

"Sure."

"I want to ask Clare out."

Adam laughed. "Didn't you do that like eight months ago?"

I smiled remembering our conversation in the hallway after my French exam and our mindblowing kiss. "Well, she sort of did the asking the first time. But we're not technically together anymore, and I'd really like to change that."

Adam rolled his eyes. "And by not technically together you mean you go out every Friday night, you hang out at least once a week besides that, usually more, and you are constantly sucking face with her when you think I'm not looking."

Okay, when he put it that way, it did sound kind of ridiculous. "Things have been really good between us. I just don't want to push her away. We broke up because things were too intense and I was a mess."

"But you're not a mess anymore," Adam protested.

"I'm not a mess at this moment," I said.

"You're over-thinking this."

He was right. And my hands were already starting to shake. "I just want to be able to tell her I love her again."

"You're such a romantic," Adam said dryly.

"And I want to see her naked again."

Adam shook his head. Then he narrowed his eyes as he processed what I just said and looked at me in shock. "Again?"

I grinned. "Oh, I didn't mention that?"

"Wow," he said, sitting back against the couch cushion. "I thought Clare was so innocent. Did you sleep with her?"

"Nope. But I got close enough that it didn't really bother me."

"Nice. You'll tell me if you do, right?"

I smirked. "Sure. Unless Clare swears me to secrecy. I do hope to do it more than once."

Adam laughed briefly, but he turned serious again. "You should tell her. That you love her. You've spent all summer dancing around each other. You're just wasting time."

"You're right," I said. "Ugh, we've spent the whole summer going out on these Friday night dates. I've already used all the good ideas. It's my turn to pick, and every romantic, original idea I have I've either already used or I pretty much can't do since I lost my license."

"Why do you have to come up with something new?" Adam asked. "You want things to go back to the way things were. Just tell her how you feel so you can get her naked."

I laughed. "And this is why you're single."

He threw the pillow I'd lobbed earlier back at me. "I'm pretty sure officially, so are you."

The doorbell rang but I heard Clare open the door. "Hello?" she called.

"In here," I yelled.

As she walked into the TV room I moved my legs off the couch so she'd have room to sit next to me, but I was disappointed to see she took the seat next to Adam on the loveseat. She dropped a large totebag on the floor and fanned her face with her hand. "It's so gross out," she said.

"You're gross," Adam said, teasingly. He was right though; she was all sweaty and I could see the top of her tank top was soaked. Not that I was looking or anything.

"You'd be gross too if you had to walk two miles in 34 degree heat." She reached up to pull her hair away from her neck and her elbow grazed Adam's shoulder.

"Yuck," Adam said pulling away from her. "Maybe you should sit next to Eli. He probably doesn't mind when you're sweaty and disgusting."

I just realized what Adam was trying to do, and immediately felt grateful to him, even though Clare not sitting next to me wasn't really that big of a deal. "Only when I'm the one who gets to make her sweaty."

Adam cringed and Clare blushed. "Gross, Eli," Adam said, and Clare kept her seat next to him. "So what are we going to do?"

Clare reached down into her tote bag and pulled out a lawn sprinkler. "It's pretty hot out. We could run through this to cool ourselves down like we're little kids."

"That's ridiculous," Adam said.

Clare gave me a hopeful look. "I don't know, Clare."

Clare shook her head at us. "When was the last time you guys ran through a sprinkler?"

"Um…never," I said and Adam didn't respond, looking uncomfortable.

"So you don't even know what you're missing out on?" Clare gave us an exasperated look. "Come on, it's a zillion degrees out, and we're bored. It's at least something different."

She glanced at Adam and I could tell she knew why he was hesitating. She nudged his leg. "We can go in our clothes. It's not like we're going swimming."

"Yeah, my mom will kill me if she picks me up and my _brand new school clothes_ are soaking wet," Adam said, imitating his mother's voice.

"I'm sure Eli has something you can wear," Clare said, looking pointedly at me.

"She's not going to give up," I told him, ignoring her request. "The sooner we give in, the sooner she stops nagging us."

Adam laughed as Clare shot us both the evil eye. "Fine."

I stood up. "I'm gonna change. I'll grab you something to wear."

Adam looked embarrassed. "Make sure the t-shirt is dark. And pants are better than shorts."

I shook my head. "Like your legs are any skinnier than mine," I teased.

I ran up to my room and changed into my bathing suit, figuring I could just leave a t-shirt on over it. I grabbed Adam a black Dead Hand T-shirt and the only pair of track pants I owned. We were about the same height so they'd probably fit.

I handed Adam the clothes and he took off for my room to change. I decided to use our brief moment of alone time to lower myself onto Clare's lap and wrap my arms around her shoulders. "Hi," I said, grinning at her.

"Hi," she said, mirroring my expression.

"How come you sat next to Adam when you came in and not me?" I said, pretending to pout.

Clare laughed. "What are you, jealous?"

"Me? Nah…," I joked.

"I'm already interrupting your guys' night. I don't want him to feel like a third wheel." That was Clare – always thinking of other people's feelings.

I wiggled my eyebrows at her. "Maybe you should kiss me before he comes back then."

Clare smiled and leaned in for a brief kiss. When she pulled back, I noticed that underneath her tank top there were straps that looped around her neck, and I knew she didn't own a bra like that. "Are you wearing your bikini under there?" I said, not even hiding the fact that I was trying to peek down her top.

She blushed. "Yeah," she said. "But I'm leaving my shirt on over it."

"Why?" I whined.

"I don't want to make Adam uncomfortable. It's less weird if all of us keep our clothes on."

I laughed. "Something tells me having a nice view of your boobs isn't going to make Adam feel uncomfortable. He is a dude, after all."

"Great, now _I_ feel uncomfortable."

I kissed her cheek. "You're beautiful."

Adam came back downstairs and we went outside. Cece liked to garden in her spare time so I dragged over the hose that was already hooked up and Clare set up the sprinkler. She backed away and I turned on the water so the sprinkler started it's slow arc.

"After you," I gestured and Clare took off, leaping through the water with a graceful dancer's leap. She let out a little shriek when she hit the cold water but she turned around to face us with a grin on her face once she reached the other side. "That was awesome."

Adam and I exchanged a look. "I feel like an idiot," I complained.

"Me too," he said.

But we both knew Clare wasn't going to give up on this, so I ran through the sprinkler to make her happy. The sun was so hot that the water actually did feel really good. Even Adam had a smile on his face when he went through.

I ran back inside the house to grab my ipod dock and turned on the music and we spent a good twenty minutes running through. Clare kept dancing as she moved toward the spray while Adam attempted to run through as fast as he could without hitting my fence. I kept things simple, just enjoying being outside for once and spending time with my two best friends and how much the water cooled me off.

Clare got creative and did a cartwheel over the spray. Adam watched her intently. "I can do that," he said. He copied her move but he couldn't keep his gangly legs straight and he ended up falling over on the other side. I cracked up and he shot me a dirty look. "I bet you can't do it either," he challenged.

I grinned. There were a lot of things that Clare and Adam didn't know about me. I set up a little father from the sprinkler and calculated the distance. I took off in a sprint and went into a roundoff, my feet hitting the ground at the perfect distance from the sprinkler to arch over it into a back handspring. I landed perfectly and held my hands over my head as Clare and Adam gaped at me.

"What the hell?" Adam asked.

"That was amazing!" Clare said.

"Three years of gymnastics," I said. "My middle school had a program and I took lessons at the YMHA."

They both laughed. "You were a gymnast?" Clare asked in disbelief.

"Yeah. I didn't really compete or anything, but I did it for fun. I was more into trampolining than traditional gymnastics though." I felt a twinge in my back and rubbed it. I had cut back tremendously once I hit Grade 9 and quit totally after Julia's death so I was really out of shape. I took a seat on a lawn chair and hoped I hadn't really messed my back up.

"The secret life of Elijah Goldsworthy," Clare teased. "I'm thirsty; do you guys want anything?"

"I'll take a water," I said and Adam shook his head.

She walked toward the house and I stared at her. Her clothes wet enough that they were clinging to her and I could kind of see the outline of her bikini top through her damp yellow tank top.

"Stop creeping your girlfriend," Adam said, pulling up a chair next to me.

"It's so hard," I said. "She's got a bikini under there and I can't see it. Just torture."

He smirked. "She'd probably take it off if she was drenched somehow. Too bad we don't have a pool to throw her into."

I laughed. "She'd be so pissed. It'd be worth it though."

Clare came back carrying two glasses of ice water and chugged half of hers down immediately. Then she headed back for the sprinkler. "You guys coming?"

I shook my head. "Taking a break." We watched her as she danced through the sprinkler.

"This has been fun," Adam said. "I haven't gone swimming in a really long time. I used to really like it. It's not the same, but…"

Adam looked sad, but this day was too fun for us to dwell on the more difficult parts of our life. "My aunt has a pool. We could go sometime. They're never home. And I'm not going to mock you for wearing clothes in the pool." I smirked and lowered my voice so Clare wouldn't hear us. "As long as you can convince Clare that you're totally cool with her not wearing them."

"Well, she should at least wear a bathing suit," he said. "You guys can save the skinny dipping for your private perverted parties."

"Ooh, I wish," I said and Adam groaned.

"I'm gonna go inside," he said. "I'm kind of thirsty and I need to take a leak."

He went back into the house. I pulled out my phone, noticing Brian had sent me a few more texts, mocking me for buying into the brainwashing. I was typing my response when Clare called my name. I looked up and saw the sprinkler had stopped.

"It broke," she said, her voice a little whiny. "I think the bar is stuck. I think if I had a screwdriver I could unjam it."

"Flathead or Phillips?" She gave me a blank look and I couldn't help but laugh. "Really, Edwards? You don't know the difference?"

I walked over to take a look and Clare held up the sprinkler. I leaned into to get a closer look at the screw she was pointing at when she pressed a button and the water turned back on full force and hit me in the face.

I screeched as the cold water drenched me, and Clare squealed with laughter. I reached for her, but she dropped the sprinkler and took off across the yard. "You little devil," I called, chasing after her.

My yard wasn't very big and I was a lot faster than her so it only took about two loops around before I caught up with her. Unfortunately we were in the grass that the sprinkler's spray reached so once I grabbed her, my feet came out from under me and we toppled to the ground. Clare was lying on top of me, and I held her to me, trying to transfer the extra wetness to her as punishment.

"You got me soaking wet," I complained.

"That's what she said."

My jaw dropped in shock at Clare's dirty joke. "I can't believe you just said that," I said, and Clare grinned.

"What? I can be dirty. You of all people should know that." She had a devilish grin on her face and it took all the strength I had to keep myself from tearing off her clothes and begging her to prove it, especially since she was still lying on top of me.

I pushed her curls out of her eyes. "I think you owe me for such a mean trick."

"Oh yeah," she said, eyes sparkling. "What do you have in mind?"

"I think you should take your shirt off."

"I'm not going to do that," she said plainly, and I knew I had to stop pushing her.

"Then I think you should go out with me Friday night. And let me surprise you."

She smiled. "Of course." She brought her mouth to my ear. "Maybe I'll even let you take my shirt off then."

I felt like I was dying of happiness and then she kissed me. My hands were on her waist and I pushed her tank top up just an inch or two so I could feel her skin. I wished it was Friday night already and we were alone and I could…

"Oh, lovebirds," Adam called but before we could look up we were hit full blast by the hose that Adam had detached from the sprinkler while we were wrapped up in each other. This was much worse than Clare's sprinkler trick and we scrambled to our feet to try to get out if its path.

Adam looked really pleased with himself, and I glanced at Clare. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" and she nodded. "Get him!" I shouted, and we tore after him. We came at two different angles and there wasn't much place from him to go even if he was a lot faster than either of us. I tackled him and held him down while Clare grabbed the hose.

"Any last words?" she asked before spraying him all over.

He managed to get out of my grip and tackled her by the leg and we all ended up in a soggy heap on the ground, laughing hysterically, happier than we had been in ages.


	11. Butterfly Nets

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Degrassi or anything else.**

**Twitter: themusiksnob / Tumblr: musiksnob**

**One more chapter after this. Thank you again for all your love and support.**

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><p>Chapter 11<p>

The straps of my backpack were digging into my shoulder as I rang Clare's doorbell. I had stuffed it full with a blanket and some sandwiches and drinks I'd picked up from the deli near my house on my walk over. I had finally decided to stop beating myself up for not being able to come up with a unique idea for our last date night of the summer and just gone with a classic – a nice romantic picnic.

Mrs. Edwards opened the door. "Hi, Eli," she said, her voice a little bit kinder than I was used to. She gestured for me to come in. "Clare should be down in a minute." She saw the bulging backpack that was slung over my shoulder and her eyes widened. "Are you kidnapping my daughter and running away?"

"What? No!" I said quickly. "I've just got some dinner and a blanket for a picnic in here. I would never do something like that."

She shook her head. "I was kidding, Eli." She gave me a soft smile as my heart started to go back to its regular pace. "A picnic sounds like a very nice date."

I had never quite gotten a good read on how Mrs. Edwards felt about me. She hated me after the disastrous first dinner, but I knew Clare had talked to her about it and that her feelings may have improved ever so slightly. She was always polite but she never really engaged me in conversation the way Mr. Edwards had. I guessed the best term for it was acceptance, but since I wanted to be in Clare's life for a very long time, I hoped we could move past that point.

Before I could respond, Clare bounded down the stairs. She had on a simple blue dress with a matching headband, a light cardigan, and flats on her feet. "Is this okay? Am I dressed appropriately for the surprise?"

"You look great," I said, not wanting to take the compliment too far in front of her mother.

"Do I need anything?"

"Just your bus pass," I said.

"Got it," she said, gesturing to the small purse in her hand.

"You don't have to take the bus," Mrs. Edwards interrupted. "I'm on my way out; I could give you a ride."

My eyes widened. Mrs. Edwards would flip out if she knew just how out of the way and secluded the place I planned to bring her daughter was. "Oh, that's no trouble," I said. "It's a quick bus ride. No need to go out of your way, especially if you have plans."

She didn't look convinced. "I don't really like Clare riding public transit by herself late at night."

Clare looked exasperated. "Mom, I won't be by myself; I'll be with Eli."

"And we'll be back at my house to watch a movie before dark and I've already talked to my parents about giving Clare a ride home in time for her curfew." Of course, in talking to them, I emphasized their need to make themselves scarce until it was right about time to give her that ride home, but Clare's mom didn't need to know that.

Mrs. Edwards smiled ruefully. "I never would have thought I'd say this, but I think I preferred the days when you'd pick Clare up in a hearse." My face fell and she touched my shoulder gently in a show of uncustomary support. "Clare, I'll have my cell if you need me. I'm not sure if I'll be home by your curfew, so don't feel like you need to wait up for me. We should head out now; I don't want to be late." She ushered us out the door and locked it before giving us a wave as she pulled away in her car.

"Where's your mom rushing off to?" I asked Clare as we walked down the block to the bus stop.

"Date. With Glen Martin." I gave her a confused look. "Old family friend."

I was surprised Clare hadn't mentioned that her mom was dating. "Is this a new thing?"

Clare sighed. "Second date, I guess. She went out with him last night too."

"Are you okay with it?" I didn't mind listening to Clare vent about her family issues, but I was hoping this wouldn't distract us from what was supposed to be a very romantic date.

She shrugged. "I know I'm supposed to want Mom to be happy. It's still just hard to admit that she wasn't happy with Dad."

I squeezed her shoulder. "I'm here, you know. If you ever need to talk about it."

"I know," she said. "Maybe soon. Not tonight."

When we arrived at the bus stop, we were the only people waiting. I wanted to cheer her up a little so I took her hand and spun her into a dance move that brought her into my arms. The gesture worked and she grinned and gave me a kiss. "So where are we going?" she asked.

"It's a surprise," I said, unwilling to give her even slightest clue.

Unfortunately our destination had been much easier to reach by car. We had to take two different buses and Clare seemed less enthused as our trip went on. She got quiet and tucked her head into my shoulder, listening to the music on my Ipod through the earbuds we were sharing. We'd been traveling for almost forty minutes before Clare's face perked up as she recognized her surroundings. "We're going to the secret church," she said grinning.

"Yup," I said, glad she was happy with my destination of choice.

"I love that place," she said, her eyes sparkling. "It's been such a long time."

The bus stop wasn't too far away and we walked to the church hand in hand. We'd come back a few times since we'd thrown the secret party with Adam, talking for hours while sitting on Morty's hood. But it had been a long time, even before we'd broken up, and I was glad to see they hadn't fenced it off to keep us away. I kicked a few empty beer bottles to the side and set up the blanket.

Clare sat down next to me and started pulling out the food. She smiled when she saw a small box of brownies. "Mmm, you remembered dessert." She unwrapped her sandwich and took a bite. "Extra pickles," she commented.

"Just like you like it."

We ate quietly, feeling pretty content just being in each other's presence. Clare seemed blissfully unaware that this night had a dual purpose for me, and I was getting a little nervous as I tried to figure out how to ask her the question I'd been dying to ask.

It turned out that it was Clare who gave me the perfect lead. "You know the only thing we're missing," Clare said, staring off into the corner.

"What's that?"

"A hammock."

_That_ would have been smart. "Next time we'll have to remember to bring it."

She smiled wistfully. "We have so many nice memories here. But that moment, in the hammock, that's my favorite one."

"Mine too," I said softly.

She moved a little closer to me on the blanket, curling her legs underneath her. "I kind of thought you were going to tell me you loved me that night in the hammock."

I looked at her carefully. I had thought about telling her that night, but I was torn by the fact that it seemed a little too soon to say the words even though I knew I'd mean them – and as always, my fears of losing her had crept in and robbed me of my courage. "I wanted to," I said. "I was just scared."

She nodded and kind of looked away, and I realized she was probably remembering the first time I actually told her I loved her – after Fitz showed up at her house unexpectedly and I thought he was doing to hurt her.

I didn't want her to have that memory in her mind. Not tonight. It needed to be about today, not the past. It needed to be about how far we'd come.

I summoned all of my courage and reached out for her, my fingers skimming her waist. She looked up at me wide-eyed, and I took a deep breath. "But I'm not too scared anymore," I said, though there was just enough of a waver in my voice to belie my words. "I love you, Clare. I love our date nights, and our goodnight phone calls, and our kisses. I love that you've supported me so much this summer when I needed you most and that you never gave up on me. I love that partly because of your strength, I've started to get better."

I could see a tear glistening on her cheek and I reached up to wipe it away, letting my hand rest gently on her neck after the gesture. "I love you, Clare," I repeated. "And we've come a long way together, and I think we're ready to make this official. I want you to be my girlfriend."

"Oh, Eli," she said softly, her voice dancing. "I never stopped."

I didn't have time to be shocked by her statement before she threw her arms around my neck with such force that it knocked me over, causing us to fall back against the blanket in a tangle of limbs. Her lips found mine and my hands wrapped around her waist, pulling her against me. This was nothing like the sweet and innocent kisses we'd shared here during our very first urban adventure. Her hands were tugging at my shirt, trying to get underneath and I was sucking on her neck, fully knowing there would be a mark, but not caring as her soft whimpers reached my ear, spurring me on.

"Eli," she moaned as I groped her through her dress. "I love you," she said.

It had been so long since she'd said those words to me, and my head fell back against the blanket. I couldn't keep myself from grinning. Clare pressed her smiling lips into mine, letting her body rest against mine more fully. Her leg came between my knees and I thrust against her, unable to control myself. I pulled one side of her dress up to touch the skin on the outside of her thigh, wishing she would let me take it off.

Clare seemed to have the same idea. She detached our mouths. "Do you think we should take this back to your house?"

I smirked at her. "Why wait until we get back there?"

She gave me a devilish grin. "The things I want to do to you aren't exactly _appropriate_ for the public setting." She slid her hand down my chest and touched me through my pants.

Jeez. I wasn't going to make it until we got back to my house if she was going to do _that_. "Yeah, we wouldn't want to get too crazy in this abandoned place of worship," I teased, and she squeaked as her hand flew away from my crotch.

She stood up and held out her hand to help me up. We gathered the blanket and the garbage and started to walk back toward the bus. Her face was flushed and her eyes were shining. "You know," she said, using a voice that was sexier than usual. "I've got a 20 in my wallet, and I _really_ don't want to wait for the bus."

"Taxi!" I called, raising my arm, and Clare grabbed onto my other arm, giggling hysterically.

It must have been my lucky day because one pulled up only a minute later. I gave the driver my address and fortunately he must have known where that was because to my surprise, Clare pushed me up against the door and started kissing me again. This was more aggressive than she'd ever been and I couldn't believe it. She even undid the first few buttons on my shirt while her tongue attacked mine.

I was starting to feel like we were on one of those late night HBO shows that I used to watch when I was thirteen and thought about sex 100 percent of the time. I kept waiting for her to stop things, considering she was nervous about doing things at the church and at least there we were alone, but she never did. So I decided to push my luck a little, reaching underneath her skirt and pressing my fingers against her through her underwear. Clare hissed at the sensation, though her legs clamped around my hand to let me know this wasn't going to happen here. She was soaked through already and I groaned, wishing that we were in my room already.

The stars were definitely aligning for me today because Friday night traffic in Toronto can be a bitch, but the cab stopped in front of my house after not too long of a trip. I pulled out my wallet, not wanting Clare to have to pay tonight and told the cabbie he could keep the change, figuring it was the least I could do after forcing him to witness Clare and I sucking face for the entire trip.

Bullfrog and Cece must have followed my instructions because they were still out, and Clare and I ran up to my room at record pace. She pushed me back onto the bed and climbed on top of me, pulling off her cardigan and discarding it on the floor. I expected her to kiss me but first she finished unbuttoning my shirt as I reached underneath her skirt to grab her ass.

I wanted to be careful and let her take the lead, but I couldn't help myself as my hands moved her dress up to touch more of her smooth, soft skin. "Clare," I whimpered as her kisses down my neck turned into bites on my collarbone. "I need…please…" I pulled on her dress in earnest, and she sat up in my lap and lifted it over her head. The sight of her overwhelmed me but I couldn't take my eyes off her. "Tell me when you want me to stop," I said softly. "I don't want to do the wrong thing."

She smiled at me, placing her hand on my chest. "Don't worry," she said. "There's only one rule that still applies." I brought her hand to my mouth and kissed her right above her purity ring to let her know I understood. It was impossible to be disappointed that she wasn't ready to sleep with me when she was lying half naked on top of me. I kept kissing up her arm, drawing her close to me again. I jumped from her shoulder to her mouth, unable to keep from kissing her for even a moment longer.

Her hips were moving against mine and my hands were everywhere, grabbing her ass and feeling her skin. I unhooked her bra, and wiggled down a bit to take her breasts into my mouth while she held herself over me. I sucked and licked and caressed her while she ground herself into me. For the first time it really hit me that we were back together – that I could kiss her whenever I wanted, that I could take her clothes off whenever she'd let me. I didn't have to worry about this being the last time she let me touch her because she loved me and I loved her and everything was perfect again.

I slowed down a little and pulled her into a hug, and she looked at me in confusion. "Everything okay?"

"Everything is perfect. I love you."

"I love you too." She smiled. "Can I show you how much?"

Before I could respond, she'd reached down for the button on my pants and was tugging them off. I leaned forward a little to shrug out of the shirt she'd unbuttoned but hadn't bothered to remove. I raised my hips off the bed so she could pull my jeans down, shocked and happy when she brought my underwear down as well. She lay back down right next to me and started kissing me intensely. I let out a huge moan as her hand wrapped around me.

"You're going to make me come," I groaned, unable to believe how good her hand felt around me. It had been too long since the last time and no matter how many times I'd done the same thing to myself in the past few months, it never felt like it did when she touched me with her soft, gentle hands.

"Isn't that the point?" she teased. She kept stroking me while her tongue tangled with mine and her tit was rubbing against my chest, and no matter how much I tried to think of gross thoughts to keep myself going, I couldn't help myself. I moaned out her name as I came, coating her hand and my stomach after an embarrassingly short amount of time.

"Sorry," I said once I had recovered. I reached for the roll of toilet paper I kept on my nightstand just for this purpose and handed some to her while I wiped the trail off my stomach.

"Don't be sorry. I love making you feel _that_ good," she giggled.

I flipped her onto her back and lowered myself onto her, wanting to make her feel as good as she had made me feel. I touched her everywhere, kissing wherever my mouth could reach, listening to her moans for clues. She had her legs wrapped around me and I was already hard again and she was thrusting against me in a way that if she didn't still have underwear on I'd probably be inside her.

I was sucking on her nipple and her back was arched half off the bed and when I started moving my head down her body, just a little, not really intending to go past her belly button, I realized she was biting her thumb to keep herself from crying out and that she'd spread her legs even wider under me. The realization of what she wanted me to do hit me and as happy as I was, I wanted to tease her a little bit first. I reversed directions and started kissing up her body, grinning against her skin as I felt the tension in her body dissipate as she realized I wasn't going to give her what she wanted.

I gave her a long kiss on the mouth, knowing that she probably wouldn't want to kiss me later and then leaned down and tugged her earlobe into my mouth. "Do you remember…" I asked seductively, "the time when we were at the woodshop…and we went out into the hallway and hid between the lockers and you let me finger you?"

I could see her eyes fluttering shut as she let out a brief "Yes," which was more of a pant than an answer.

"Do you remember what I said I wanted to do to you?"

"Please," she whispered and I couldn't even keep up the teasing act anymore.

I sat up between her legs and pulled her underwear off as quickly as I could. Despite the look of impatience in her eyes, I couldn't help but scan her beautiful naked body for a moment. I pushed aside my sadness at all the months I had been unable to be this close, this intimate with her, and dove between her legs with enthusiasm, parting her folds and licking her clit for the very first time. It had been even longer since I'd done this last, not since Julia, but if Clare's loud, sexy sounds were any indication I hadn't lost any of my skill.

I took it all in, her taste and scent, her shaking thighs next to my ears, the arc of her body I could see whenever I looked up to see the look of absolute ecstasy on her face. She gasped when my fingers slipped into her and her cries turned from generic whimpers to high pitched squeals, repeating my name over and over.

Clare had one hand tugging on her nipple and the other grasped my hair. It was the sexiest she'd ever looked, or at least I thought so until I took things up a notch, licking so fast it sent vibrations through her body. The orgasm hit her so hard that she screamed and sat up, unable to keep herself on the bed. I attempted to keep things going, but she covered her face with her hands and said, "Stop, stop, stop," as she fell back against the pillow.

I placed a kiss on her inner thigh, hoping to wipe off my face enough that Clare wouldn't be afraid to kiss me and I lay down next to her, sharing her pillow. I draped one arm across her stomach, wanting to touch her, but realizing she was probably feeling a little bit overwhelmed. When she opened her eyes, she gazed at me with the most blissful expression I'd ever seen.

"I love you," she whispered and leaned in for a brief kiss. Her eyes widened a bit as she tasted herself on my lips and to my surprise and delight, she initiated a second, daring to open my mouth with her tongue.

"I love you too," I said when she ended the kiss. I couldn't help but grin at the beautiful girl in my arms.

"I'm so happy," she said.

"I bet you are," I teased. She tightened her arms around me.

I felt so lucky to have her and so happy we'd finally worked things out. But there were a few questions lurking in the back of my mind and I figured this was as good a time as any to make sure we were truly on the same page.

"Can I ask you something?" She nodded, a look of worry crossing her face for the first time. "A few weeks ago you weren't ready for well…this." I gestured at our naked bodies. "And you said you needed more time. I just wanted to make absolutely sure that you're ready and that I'm not pushing you and…"

"Eli," she interrupted. "I am completely ready. I want this every bit as much as you do."

I was glad to hear it but there was still some residual doubt in my mind. "What changed?" I asked.

She smiled ruefully. "I was so scared after your accident, Eli. Scared that you'd kill yourself. Scared that you'd keep lying to me. Scared that I'd lose you. But we've spent this whole summer together and every time I was with you…it felt like you, Eli. It felt like the real you. And I wanted to give you my heart again but I was terrified."

She squeezed my hand. "I was almost ready last time we…fooled around," she whispered and I had to laugh at how shy she was about these things. "But I knew if I let it get this far, it would mean I was committing 100% and I just couldn't do that yet." She leaned closer to me and pushed my bangs out of my eyes. "I hate to bring this up, but you know what it was that convinced me? That made me sure that I could be with you and you wouldn't hurt me or yourself? When you told Bullfrog and Cece."

I blinked at her in surprise as she continued, "Because I knew that if you had the courage to share the deepest, darkest part of you, there was no way you would lie to me. If you were having trouble with your pills, you'd tell me or your parents or your doctor. You wouldn't be too ashamed and keep it a secret and get yourself in trouble. You've opened yourself up in so many ways this summer and dealt with so many things and you've really let me in. I have no doubts about you, or about us." She smiled, a small tear leaking out of her eye. "I trust you."

I'd been waiting to hear her say "I love you" for the past few months.

But somehow, "I trust you" was even better.


	12. I'm Gonna Make It Better

**DISCLAIMER: I don't own Degrassi or anything else.**

**Twitter: themusiksnob / Tumblr: musiksnob**

**This is the last chapter of Sentimental Heart. Please forgive this epically long author note, as I have a lot of people I'd like to thank.**

**The fic is dedicated of course to Sarenka222 who was not only the sole reason I decided to write it, but has also been my editor on many of these chapters. It has been wonderful working on this with you and I'm sure we will do this again.**

**I'd also like to dedicate this final chapter to the best Degrassi fanfiction writer ever and a good friend Floorplanhobo. She is finishing up her final Degrassi fic right now, and I can't even begin to thank her for all the inspiration and support she has given me.**

**Two other friends I'd like to mention are LiteraryLolita and AlbatrossTam14. They both helped me with my two other long fics (True Love Waits and I Thought I Saw Your Face Today) and without having those under my belt, particularly ITISYFT, I would never have been able to write this one.  
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**As for the rest of you, there are too many people to mention by name, but trust me, I love every one of you. Thanks to everyone who has read this fic, who has left me a review, who has pestered me on Twitter or Tumblr over when I'll be updating next. It really has been hard to write Eclare right now with the show providing very little inspiration and it's only because of your support that I am able to continue. I'm not really sure what I'll be writing next. I've got two oneshots in mind: one that needs to be written before next weeks' eps, and a possible prequel to Regrets. After that I'm not sure. But I'm not giving up, so please don't worry if my updates are fewer in number and frequency.**

**Also, if you're wondering where the sex is in this chapter, I would direct you to the epilogue of I Thought I Saw Your Face Today.**

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><p>Chapter 12<p>

My first day back at school was pretty much the same as last year – except this time I wasn't the new kid. The only two Grade 12 classes I was in were French and Advanced English with Clare. I was psyched that as boring as retaking Physics and Pre-Calc was going to be, both Clare and Adam were in my classes. I had taken a study hall instead of an elective last year since creative writing was only offered during one period and I couldn't work my schedule around it, so Clare and I were together in that as well. But our gym and history classes were reversed, so I'd be forced to suffer through another year with Mr. Perino alone.

I was feeling more comfortable than expected. The curtailment of the uniform policy meant that it wasn't glaringly obvious that I was in Grade 11 again, and though I'd gotten a few odd looks from my new classmates, my black clothing and metal accessories didn't exactly make them want to get close enough to ask too many questions.

Even so, I couldn't wait for this first day to be over. I was on my way to my last period history class when I turned the corner and almost bumped into Fitz.

"Sorry," he said, before looking at me and realizing who I was. He gave me a curt nod and kept walking without saying anything else or causing a scene.

This was the first time I had seen him since the dance when I had punched the crap out of him for kissing Clare. The day had been going so well that I'd completely forgotten that he was still here, that he was still a threat to me. I could feel my breathing increase and I grabbed onto the wall, praying to whatever make-believe deity would listen to keep me from having a panic attack.

The nurse's office was just down the hall, and if I could make it there, she could give me a pill and then I'd be okay. I took three steps toward it before the pain in my chest hit me full blast. I grabbed onto the lockers again, gasping for air, and this time people noticed me.

"You okay, buddy?" Owen asked as he exchanged looks with Bianca.

I wanted that pill; I wanted to be out of the hallway and away from all the people looking at me – I wanted this pain to go away.

"Nurse," I croaked, and he grabbed me under my arm and practically dragged me down the hall, Bianca supporting me on the other side.

They sat me in a chair inside the door, and I grabbed onto my chest. "Thanks," I managed to get out, trying to send them the message to leave.

Owen patted my shoulder. "We gotta go. They don't write late passes for bad kids. Hope it's not a heart attack," he joked, and I would have laughed if I didn't feel like he was right.

The nurse came in from one of the exam rooms and shook her head. "The first day? I knew you were going to be a problem. I'm not your mommy and I'm not going to give you a pill just because you've got a craving."

The terror came back as I realized that not only was Fitz here but the nurse – the person who was supposed to be on my side – wasn't going to help me. I gasped for air, putting my head between my legs to keep myself from passing out. "Please," I begged.

She walked over to me with her stethoscope and listened to my racing heartbeat. She frowned and realized that maybe I wasn't faking this. "Fine," she said. "I'll get you a pill. But don't even think about making a habit of this."

As I waited, I thought of all the panic attacks I'd had in the past few month, how Clare had been there or Adam or Cece or Bullfrog, hugging me and encouraging me.

I'd never felt more alone than in this moment. I felt tears stream down my face as I tried to focus on something positive, like Clare's smile.

The nurse came back with one pill and a cup of water, and I took it quickly, making sure to sip the water because I didn't need to give her any more reasons think I was just trying to use. She watched me carefully then turned on her heel. "I need to lock the bottle back up. I'll give you five minutes before I send you back to class."

She shut the door to her office, and I just sat there, shaking in disbelief. Not even when I was in rehab was I treated like this. The sadness and fear were making it impossible to calm down and I knew I really needed another pill, but I couldn't give her the pleasure of proving her right. I tried to get my head back in order but I still felt tense.

I had closed my eyes, trying to focus on anything but the uncomfortable nurse's office when I heared the main door fly open. I didn't open my eyes until I heard Clare's voice. "Are you okay?" she said, rushing toward me. Her face was a picture of concern as she knelt down in front of me, taking my hands in hers. "Bianca found me in the locker room." She was wearing her gym shirt over her jeans and it was obvious she'd run here the second she heard.

A tear rolled down my face. "I'm glad you're here."

"Of course, Eli. What happened?"

I hated to tell her, but I'd promised myself I'd never lie to her again. "I saw Fitz."

Her eyes widened, but the look of shame on my face must have told her just how innocent our encounter was. "Oh Eli," she said softly.

"I had to take a pill," I admitted. I had been doing so well without them the past few weeks since everything else in my life had been so good.

"That's okay, Eli," she reminded me. "Sometimes you need them. Today was one of those days. Hopefully tomorrow won't be." I let out a sigh of relief; I was expecting Clare to be disappointed in me, but she was being so supportive.

She pressed her hand against my chest. "Your heart's still racing. Why isn't it helping?"

I blinked out a few remaining tears, though I was starting to feel better with Clare touching me. "The nurse didn't believe me. She gave me a hard time. I'm just…I'll be okay."

Clare stood up, a look of anger on her face. "She what?"

At Clare's outburst, the nurse came bursting out of her office. "What is the meaning of this? You can't be in here."

I had never seen Clare stand up to an authority figure and I couldn't believe her when she said, "Clearly I need to be, since you're treating my boyfriend like a drug addict."

The nurse looked furious. "How dare you speak to me like that? Mr. Goldsworthy…"

"Eli," Clare interrupted, "has an anxiety disorder that causes severe panic attacks that need to be managed with medication. I am sure you don't give diabetic students a hard time when they need to take insulin."

"Given his history of non-compliant behavior, I had reason to believe…"

"Eli hasn't taken a pill improperly in months, and in fact, he struggles with whether to take them even in moments when he truly needs them. And when you treat him like a drug addict, it just makes it even harder on him." She gestured at me. "He would have been back in class already if you didn't give him a hard time and exacerbate his symptoms. He's trying to do things the right way, and you're making this harder on him."

The nurse looked like she was ready to kill both of us. "Ms. Edwards, I believe you're due back in class. You can tell me how to do my job when you've graduated from nursing school." But she looked rattled in a way that I knew what Clare had said had gotten through. She scribbled me a hall pass. "You can walk him back to class."

She slammed the door to her office so loud that a painting on the wall rattled. Clare tugged on my hand and I stood. I wasn't 100% back to normal but I felt a lot better. When we got out in the hallway, Clare covered her face with her hands. "I can't believe I just yelled at the nurse."

"Well, I appreciate the support," I whispered.

"For you, anytime," she said, standing on her tiptoes to give me a quick kiss. "I don't want you to go through this again. If you want, I can hang onto your pills for you. You've been doing so well that I don't think I'd need to worry about you taking advantage of my kindness."

I shrugged. "I think you got through to the nurse. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully it won't be an issue very often."

We were just about up to Mr. Perino's door. "Do you want to get coffee at the Dot after school? Celebrate making it through the first day?"

I was definitely not up for that. "I think I'm just going home. Maybe take a nap. I didn't sleep well last night."

She looked concerned. "Okay, another time then. Call me later."

By the time I walked into class, the period was almost half over, and in spite of the note from the nurse, Mr. Perino had to be a jackass and say, "Ah, Mr. Goldsworthy. Tardy on the first day. Let's try not to have to repeat Grade 11 for a third time." I was in such a shit mood between him and the nurse that I tuned him out for the rest of the class.

When the bell rang, I made a beeline for my locker. I grabbed my books quickly, since I really didn't want to see Adam or Clare, and walked over to the school buses. This was my first bus experience, since Cece had dropped me off this morning so she could bring my pills to the nurse. It took me a while to find the right one, and I took a seat in the back, glaring at anyone who looked like they were thinking of sitting next to me.

The bus dropped me off only half a block from my house, but mine was the last stop. So what was usually a five minute drive or a twenty minute walk turned into a 40 minute bus ride of torture. By the time I got home, I was pissed. Pissed at the nurse, pissed at Perino, pissed off that I had two more years off high school suffering ahead of me. Pissed at myself for crashing Morty and ruining everything.

I sat down on my bed with my head in my hands and tried to focus. But I felt like all the progress I had made had come crashing down on me the second I went back to Degrassi. Just the sight of Fitz sent me spiraling down. I thought I had built up some resistance, that I was getting stronger. But I was wrong. I was just as weak as before the accident.

I was shaking and I knew that if I couldn't get myself out of this, I'd be facing yet another panic attack, but I just couldn't stop. I thought of Clare, and her look of concern. I didn't want her to be concerned about me. I wanted to her to look at me like she wanted to fuck me or like I was the only guy on earth she loved. I couldn't stand the pitying way Owen and Bianca looked at me when they dragged me to the nurse's office; I'd been in a few classes with them last year and they barely did any of their work but they still moved on to Grade 12 and I didn't.

Fuck. I was sweating and my hands were shaking and I needed another fucking pill but Cece was at work and Bullfrog was out doing whatever the fuck he was doing. I stood up, pacing back and forth as best I could in my room, pissed off that my room was still full of so much crap because I was too fucking psycho to throw anything out. I picked up a paperback book and threw it across the room. It smacked into my lamp, which toppled over but fortunately didn't break.

I needed a pill and I needed a pill now. I thought back to my conversation with Bullfrog, how he said the combination wasn't too hard and if he were me, he would have gotten in there already. I went into their room and opened up Cece's closet door. The safe was on the shelf above her clothes and there was a stepstool conveniently located under it. It had a keypad and I typed in a random number and discovered the code must have four digits.

I tried everything. My birthday, Cece's and Bullfrog's. Our house number. I tried 1111, 2222, and so on, and nothing worked. But then I remembered a number with a lot of significance for Bullfrog and Cece: the year that Bad Religion and the Replacements formed. When The Clash released London calling. My parents' favorite Smashing Pumpkins song.

1979.

The lock clicked open. The only thing inside was a bottle of my pills. I grabbed it, not bothering to close the safe and walked back to my room.

Just having the bottle in my hand was already making me feel better. It was about half-full. I wasn't sure when I had gotten a refill, but it was possible Cece gave some of these to the school nurse. I wondered if they'd notice if I sneaked a few out to have on hand. Just in case.

Shit, what if they counted the pills? My parents used to trust me, but they thought I was a drug addict too, just like the nurse. I stared at the bottle. There was a lot at stake here. It was more than one pill, one time.

Fuck. I didn't want to take it, but the more I thought about it, the more anxious I got and the more I needed it. I started pacing again, not even paying attention to the stuff on my floor as I held onto the bottle for dear life. But my hands started shaking and I dropped the bottle. It fell onto something metal with a large clang, and I dropped to my knees in horror. By some miracle, though, the bottle wasn't cracked and the top was child proofed so it hadn't come flying off.

I moved a magazine out of the way to figure out what the bottle had hit when it fell and discovered my old locked box that I used to keep my pills in. I had been using it to store the letters that I wrote to myself.

I almost laughed off the coincidence, but I figured that this was exactly the situation I had written the letters to prevent, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I got the key that was pinned to the stuffed bear in my closet and opened up the box. I grabbed the letter from the top and settled back onto my bed.

_Dear Eli,_

_This is pretty fucking stupid, writing letters to yourself. But the shrinks said I had to write something and gothic fiction stories don't count and I'm not really a dear diary kind of guy, so here you go. I'm supposed to be telling you all of the reasons you're not supposed to abuse your pills, as if you don't know them. You crashed Morty. You could have died. You fucked up the best thing that ever happened to you._

_But I guess it's a good thing that I waited until the very last moment to write this before Dr. Martin would have put me on lockdown for being non-compliant with therapy. Because Clare walked in here today. And even after fucking things up worse than anything you've ever done in your life, she still wants to be part of your life. And I hope by the time you read this letter, you've gotten her back, but something tells me if you had her, you wouldn't need this. Because you'd know that even a moment with Clare Edwards is worth more than having a panic attack go away a minute sooner. It's worth more than a fuzzy feeling that blocks out reality. It's worth everything. You won't have happiness without Clare in your life, and you can't have Clare unless you get your shit together._

_I know I'm supposed to tell you that you should be doing this for you. And that's true. But I know you don't care about yourself nearly as much as you care about Clare. So whatever you're about to do that made you read this letter. Don't do it._

_Eli_

_PS. If you fuck this up, she's never going to have sex with you._

I couldn't help but laugh at the postscript. But I reread the letter three times, looking between it and the bottle of pills. It was hard to take past Eli's advice. Sure I'd been in rehab for three weeks before I wrote it, but I was still pretty fucked up at the time. And as much as it was hard to admit it, I had come a long way since then. Even though I hated my illness, I had accepted that anxiety was part of my life, and tried to learn better ways to deal with it. I had learned how to be honest, even when it was hard or I was afraid of hurting the people I loved.

But then I kept thinking: I was in a much better place and I still wanted that pill. The bottle was still clenched in my fist. If this was how it was going to feel, what was the point in getting better? I didn't want to spend the rest of my life suffering panic attack after panic attack at the slightest trigger. The pills made the pain go away.

I kept coming back to the line _And I hope by the time you read this letter, you've gotten her back, but something tells me if you had her, you wouldn't need this. _I shouldn't need this. I had Clare, but I was still sitting here, pills in hand, ready to fuck this all up. Why wasn't what I had with her enough?

The more I thought about it, I realized it wasn't just about Clare. It wasn't because I did have Clare back and that she meant the world to me. It was because I had become the kind of person that Clare could love again, someone she could trust. And going back on that, taking pills and lying about it…I'd lose not only Clare or Adam or my parents. I'd lose myself.

I tucked the letter into the envelope and stuck it at the bottom of the locked box. I hid the box away and then the key. I grabbed the bottle of pills and my cell phone and walked out of my room.

"Hey, Clare," I said, as I put the bottle back into the safe and locked it up. "I changed my mind about coffee. Do you still want to go?" I smiled at her answer. "Meet you at the Dot in 20?"

"Perfect," I responded. "See you there…I love you, too."


End file.
